Language Arts 8

Year-long; 8th Grade

Students will continue to develop their understanding and use of words by studying context clues, roots and affixes, and word relationships. Students will read a variety of literary genres in the form of novels, short stories, drama, and non-fiction both individually and as a class. Students will be expected to continue applying reading strategies such as predicting, comparing, inferencing, evaluating, and synthesizing with increasing independence to further analyze the text based on the genre for a deeper understanding. Writing instruction will continue to focus on organization and clarity and writing expectations will be based upon criteria for each piece to correspond with a given genre. Students will learn to apply revision techniques that make the final piece more engaging and appropriate to the audience. Writing conventions emphasized include spelling, punctuation, capitalization, parts-of-speech usage, clause usage, subject-verb agreement, and verb conjugation. Research will focus on appropriate topic generation, source validity, use of technology, proper documentation formatting and presentation methods. Students will practice active listening strategies which focus on making inferences and interpreting visual media. In addition, students will deliver both formal and informal presentations that have a defined purpose taking into consideration the audience while demonstrating organization and clarity.

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