English Language Arts 9

Unit 1: Story and Text

Big Idea: texts are built to do a job, told through craft choices, and increasingly delivered through visual and digital design. Telling text forms, functions, and genres apart; using text features; recognizing literary elements and devices; and reading the elements of visual and graphic texts.

• Forms of text
• Functions of text
• Genres of text

• Using text features

• Characterization
• Narrative structures
• Setting

• Sensory detail
• Figurative language
• Irony
• Paradox
• Oxymoron

• Layout
• Infographics
• Emoticons
• Icons
• Symbols
• Interactive visuals
• Hypertext
• Colour
• Illustration style

Unit 2: Strategies and Processes

Big Idea: strong readers, speakers, thinkers, and writers each rely on a deliberate toolkit of strategies. Using reading strategies to build meaning from more demanding texts, oral language strategies to communicate and listen with purpose, metacognitive strategies to monitor and direct your own thinking, and the writing process to develop and refine a piece of writing.

• Using contextual clues
• Using phonics and word structure
• Visualizing
• Questioning (reading)
• Predicting
• Previewing text
• Summarizing
• Making inferences

• Focusing on the speaker
• Asking questions to clarify
• Listening for specifics
• Expressing opinions
• Speaking with expression
• Staying on topic
• Taking turns

• Reflecting
• Questioning your own thinking
• Goal setting
• Self-evaluating

• Revising
• Editing
• Considering audience

Unit 3: Language Features, Structure, and Conventions

Big Idea: language is a set of tools writers and speakers deliberately choose from — spoken delivery, paragraph structure, an evolving vocabulary, stylistic choice, correct usage, sentence craft, conventions, presentation, persuasive rhetoric, and the shades of meaning inside a single word. Precise control over these tools is what separates competent writing from powerful writing.

• Tone (spoken)
• Volume
• Inflection
• Pace
• Gestures

• Multi-paragraphing

• Language change

• Diction
• Figurative language as style
• Tone (written style)
• Inclusive language
• Degree of formality

• Avoiding double negatives
• Mixed metaphors
• Malapropisms
• Word misuse

• Using a mix of sentence types
• Correct pronoun use
• Subject-verb agreement
• Using transitional words
• Spotting run-ons and fragments

• Punctuation
• Capitalization
• Quoting
• Canadian spelling

• Presentation techniques

• Figurative language as rhetoric
• Parallelism
• Repetition
• Irony as rhetoric
• Humour
• Exaggeration
• Emotional language
• Logic
• Direct address
• Rhetorical questions
• Allusion

• Connotation
• Denotation