English Language Arts
English language arts education incorporates the teaching and learning of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing. Integration of language arts occurs in multiple ways. First, curriculum, instruction, and assessment reflect the integration of listening, speaking, viewing, reading, and writing. The language arts are not perceived as individual content areas, but as one unified subject in which each of the five areas supports the others and enhances thinking and learning. Secondly, there is integration of the teaching and learning of content and process within the curriculum. The common human experiences and the ideas, conflicts, and themes embodied in literature and all oral, written, and visual texts provide a context for the teaching of the processes, skills, and strategies of listening, speaking, viewing, reading, and writing. Finally, literacy educators believe the knowledge, skills and strategies of language arts are integrated throughout the curriculum, enabling students to solve problems and think critically and creatively in all subject areas.
Language arts is the vehicle of communication by which we live, work, share, and build ideas and understandings of the present, reflect on the past, and imagine the future. Through language arts, we learn to appreciate, integrate, and apply what is learned for real purposes in our homes, schools, communities, and workplaces.
An effective language arts program should encompass process and content—how people communicate as well as what they communicate. Process includes skills and strategies used in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and viewing. Content includes the ideas, themes, issues, problems, and conflicts found in classical and contemporary literature and other texts, such as technical manuals, periodicals, speeches, and videos. Ideas, experiences, and cultural perspectives we discover in texts help us shape our visions of the world. The insight we gain enables us to understand our cultural, linguistic, and literary heritages.
You can check out the following resources from the Beaverton School District and our ELA Team
