English Language Arts

MA ELA Frameworks

Students Who are College and Career Ready in Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening, and Language

All students engage in reading, writing, speaking, listening and language throughout their school careers. They comprehend and evaluate complex texts across a range of types and disciplines, reading purposefully and listening attentively to gain both general knowledge and discipline-specific expertise. They can construct effective arguments and convey intricate or multifaceted information. Likewise, students are able independently to discern a speaker’s key points, request clarification, and ask relevant questions. They build on others’ ideas, articulate their own ideas, and confirm they have been understood.

Students appreciate that the twenty-first-century classroom and workplace are settings in which people from often widely divergent cultures and who represent diverse experiences and perspectives must learn and work together. Students actively seek to understand other perspectives and cultures through reading and listening, and they are able to communicate effectively with people of varied backgrounds. They evaluate other points of view critically and constructively. Through reading great classic and contemporary works of literature representative of a variety of periods, cultures, and worldviews, students can vicariously inhabit worlds and have experiences much different than their own.

Excerpt from MA DESE Curriculum Framework for Language and Literacy, 2011, http://www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/ela/0311.pdf