ELS3O, Literacy Skills: Reading and Writing, Grade 11, open, (1 credit)

Reading Skills

• Read a variety of contemporary texts for different purposes with an emphasis on locating important information, identifying main ideas and supporting details, and responding imaginatively.
  
• Pre-reading: determine purpose, make predictions
  
• While reading: confirm main ideas, relate to prior knowledge.
  
• After reading: summarize key points (skim text to locate specific ideas).
  
• Assess: identify strengths and weaknesses; set goals for improvement.
  
• Explain the role of the introduction, body, and conclusion of a short essay; use knowledge of compare and contrast, or cause and effect to locate answers to questions about text. Be aware of use of table of contents, index, illustrations, and diagrams to clarify information.

Texts:

• Make inferences, draw conclusions, about a character’s values based on information in a short story; discuss the perspective of the writer of an article; chart information about a character in a short story; state the main idea in an opinion piece; differentiate between fact and opinion in a magazine article.
  
• Compare individual preferences for authors, genres, and topics; explain how this influences responses to, and interpretation of texts.
  Study the elements of drama, the short story, the novel, poetry, newspaper and magazine articles to understand and interpret these texts.

Style:

• describe how particular words and phrases help communicate ideas, feelings, and information (literary devices).

Vocabulary:

• build vocabulary by using context, using print and electronic dictionaries, etc

Possible Resources:

• Reading and Writing Senior
• Reading in the Content Areas
• Reading for Proficiency

Activities:

• Pair and group work.
• Individual and group Oral Presentations
  - report main ideas and details to a small group.

Writing

• Generate ideas and explore topics (brainstorm, use graphic organizers, use graphs and charts as sources of information, identify key words to narrow a topic). Assess information to determine its relevance and accuracy.
  
• Complete short research projects.
  
• Written work should emphasize: narratives, summaries, reports, letters, short essays; each piece should be for an intended purpose and for an intended audience, e.g., formal language in a short essay, third person in the summary of a report, first person in a friendly letter.
  
• Write a variety of types of complete sentence types.
  
• Write coherent paragraphs (topic sentence and relevant details to develop the main idea); use a specific pattern such as logical, chronological, or climactic order to organize information in a paragraph.
  
• Organize paragraphs into coherent narratives, reports, letters, short essays.
  
• Revise drafts to improve content, organization, coherence, consistent use of the appropriate person and level of language.
  
• Edit, proofread, publish, e.g., bulletin board display of work, class anthology, etc.

Possible Resources:

• Introduction to Academic Writing (Units 1 - 4)
• Weaving It Together, 3
• Writing for Proficiency
• Writing To Explain
• EQAO Testing Materials

Activities:

• Presentation
• Journals
• Paragraph
• Summaries
• Report
• Essay