English Language Arts 4

Texts are made for three common purposes, to inform, to persuade and to provide enjoyment: a bus schedule informs, a poster saying “Vote for Ava!” persuades, and a joke book provides enjoyment.

A purpose is the job a text was made to do.

Narrative texts, fiction or non-fiction, can follow a five-part structure, beginning, problem, events, solution and ending: a news report about a hiker lost in the mountains, the search, and the dog that found her has all five.

A narrative is any text that tells events in order, made up or true.

The main plot is a story's biggest line of events, and a subplot is a smaller story running beside it: in a novel about a team trying to win the hockey final, the goalie's worry about her sick grandmother is a subplot.

A long story can carry more than one story at a time.

An autobiography is the true story of a person's life written by that person, so it is told with I: “I was born in Lethbridge in the winter of 1990, the year my dad bought our first snowblower.”

Auto means self.

Poets choose figurative language to create a desired effect: “The north wind gnawed at our fingers like a hungry dog” makes the cold feel painful and alive.

A poet does not just say “it was very cold”, because those words make you feel almost nothing.

Oral traditions support connections to people and to a community: a family story told at every reunion links cousins who rarely meet to the same great-grandparents, and to each other.

An oral tradition is what people pass on by voice: stories, songs, sayings and teachings.

Respectful interactions consider the other people taking part: their contributions, feelings, points of view and needs, as when a group waits for its quietest member to finish her idea before deciding.

Respect in a talk shows in what people do.

Listening includes restating key points in your own words: after a partner explains a plan for the class garden, “So you want the beans by the fence, where they can climb” shows the key point was caught.

A key point is the part of what someone said that matters most.

A presentation is prepared by developing a plan first: the topic, the main points in order, and how to begin and end are decided before any slides, posters or cards are made.

The plan is the skeleton of the talk.

Oral traditions support connections to the natural world: in the Blackfoot story of the Wolf Trail, wolves teach a hungry family which animals are good to eat, so the story carries knowledge of the animals from teller to listener.

The natural world is the land, water, plants, animals and sky.

An extensive and varied vocabulary lets you say exactly what you mean in more situations: a writer who knows trudged, strolled and sprinted can show three very different walks.

The more words you know, the more exactly you can say things.

Figurative language includes personification, which gives an animal or an object a quality or ability that a person can have: “The old truck groaned up the hill” gives a truck a person's tired groan.

There are three kinds of figurative language to learn here: personification, analogy and idiom.

Words are examined morpheme by morpheme, the smallest parts with meaning: unpredictable has four morphemes, un, pre, dict and able.

Each morpheme adds a piece of meaning.

Tier 2 words are words used across many subjects, and in books more than in everyday talk: reluctant, survive and increase turn up in science, in stories and in math alike.

Teachers often call everyday words like happy tier 1 words, and one subject's own words, like photosynthesis, tier 3 words; tier 2 words sit in between.

Personification works on animals as well as objects: “The crow scolded us from the fence” gives a crow a person's way of telling someone off.

Animals do lots of things on their own.

Proficient reading aloud is accurate, automatic and expressive, with a focus on meaning, so a listener can hear what the reader understood: “The bear, not the hiker, ran away,” read with a lean on bear and a pause at each comma, makes it clear who ran.

The three parts of fluency are accuracy (the right words), automaticity (words recognized without effort) and prosody (the voice's stress, pausing, phrasing and rise and fall).

A comma can change what a whole sentence means, so the voice pauses where it is: “Let's eat, Grandma” invites Grandma to the table, and “Let's eat Grandma” sounds as if Grandma is supper.

Here the comma sets off the person being spoken to.

Less common punctuation marks guide the voice too: a dash makes a short, sharp pause before what follows, words in brackets are read a little lower and quicker, like a side comment, and an ellipsis lets the voice trail off or wait.

In “My cousin (the one who lives in Red Deer) is visiting,” the brackets hold extra information, so the voice drops and moves quickly, then picks the main sentence up again.

Intonation, the rise and fall of the voice, shows what kind of sentence is being read: “You're coming?” has no question word, so only the voice rising at the question mark shows that it asks and does not tell.

”, usually rises at the end, and its question mark is the reader's only signal.

Stress shows which word carries the new or important information: in “Mia didn't eat the cake. She ate the pie,” the stress on pie shows the reader understood the contrast.

Stress is not decoration.

Longer and more complex texts become manageable through independent practice with a variety of strategies: a reader who reads on their own most days, choosing a book a little harder each time, can move from short chapter books to a full-length novel over a year.

Reading grows like any skill, through regular practice that is a little harder than comfortable.

Connections that support comprehension come in three kinds, text to self, text to text and text to world: a story about a family whose crops fail can connect to a grandparent's farm, to another story about a drought, and to real dry summers on the prairies.

Each kind draws on a different store of knowledge: your own life, other texts you have read, watched or heard, and what is true about the world.

Inferencing uses several thinking skills at once: inferring that the new girl is lonely uses the clue that she eats alone, the knowledge that eating alone can feel lonely, and a check that she smiles when someone finally joins her.

An inference is not a guess.

Summarizing means choosing the key ideas and the few specific details worth keeping: a summary of a page on how beavers build lodges keeps the main steps and one telling detail, the underwater door.

Key ideas carry the text; specific details are the small facts under them.

Problem solving in reading happens at three levels: a word that can't be read or understood, a sentence that doesn't make sense, and a whole passage whose point has been lost.

Naming the level of a problem is the first step to fixing it.

Writing for a different audience changes the words and how much is explained: a note to the principal asking for a bike rack is polite and gives reasons, while a text to a friend about the same idea can be short and casual.

Each audience knows different things and expects different things.

A piece of several paragraphs is planned by grouping its ideas, one group to a paragraph: ideas about the class trip that belong to the bus ride, the museum and the picnic make three body paragraphs.

Each paragraph holds one group of ideas that belong together.

Writing moves through five processes, planning, drafting, revising, editing and publishing, and a writer can loop back: a revision may send the writer back to planning a new middle for a story.

The processes are tools, not a staircase climbed once.

Creative thinking reviews, revises and enhances an idea: a story idea about a lost dog grows stronger when the writer asks, “What if the dog is the one telling the story?”

First ideas are a starting point.

A research question focuses the topic and the process: “Why do some birds fly south for the winter while others stay?” turns the topic birds into a search, and also shows where to look, in a bird book, on a nature centre's website and at the feeder outside.

A topic is a field to wander in; a question is a path through it.

An abbreviation is the shortened form of a word or words: Rd. shortens one word, Road, and BC shortens two, British Columbia, so one abbreviation can stand for a whole name.

Abbreviations save space where the same words come up again and again: addresses, calendars, charts and maps.

The subject of a verb is the person or thing that performs the action: in “The snowplow cleared our street”, the snowplow does the clearing, so the snowplow is the subject of cleared.

Every action verb has someone or something doing it.

Sentences come in four types, each with its own name: a statement tells (“The ice is smooth.”), a question asks (“Is the ice smooth?”), an exclamation shows strong feeling (“What smooth ice!”) and a command tells someone to do something (“Skate to the blue line.”).

The type is decided by the sentence's job, and the end mark usually follows from it.

A spelling pattern can be written as the order of vowels (V) and consonants (C) from the first vowel to the end of a word: in wedge, e is V, d and g are CC, and the final silent e is written e, so wedge is VCCe.

The vowels are a, e, i, o and u, and the other letters count as consonants (these patterns use words without y or w as vowels).

Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but different spellings and meanings: hear and here, flour and flower, and even sets of three, such as cent, scent and sent.

Pronunciation is how a word is said, so homophones are words that are said the same way.