English Language Arts 9

Unit 1: Reading and Comprehension

Strategies for understanding texts — finding explicit and implicit meaning, using textual cues to navigate, recognizing that readers interpret differently, and extending your thinking by weighing other points of view.

• Explicit and implicit meaning
• Textual cues, skimming and scanning
• Why readers interpret differently

• Weighing multiple points of view

Unit 2: Responding to and Analyzing Texts

Reading like an analyst — inferring character from choices and motives, recognizing literary techniques such as irony and symbolism, understanding forms and genres, comparing how character, plot and theme develop, and seeing how texts reflect culture.

• Character choices and motives
• Irony, symbolism and other techniques

• Forms and genres
• Comparing character, plot and theme

• How texts reflect culture

Unit 3: Creating Texts

Writing your own texts — generating ideas from experience and theme, and structuring a narrative so plot, setting and character work together to reveal meaning.

• Generating ideas from a theme
• Structuring a narrative

Unit 4: Research and Information

Handling information like a researcher — focusing a question, judging sources for reliability and bias, organizing what you find, and recording it in your own words with credit to sources.

• Focusing a research question
• Evaluating sources for bias

• Organizing information
• Summarizing in your own words

Unit 5: Writing Craft and Conventions

Polishing writing — revising for clear structure and consistent point of view, choosing words for their connotation, and applying the conventions of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

• Revising for structure and flow
• Denotation and connotation

• Parallel structure
• Punctuation and quotation marks
• Spelling strategies