Standard 3: Critical Reading and Writing

Students will apply critical thinking skills to reading and writing.

12.3.R.1 Students will evaluate the extent to which historical, cultural, and/or global perspectives affect authors’ stylistic and organizational choices in grade-level literary and informational genres.

Student Actions 

Teacher Actions 

• Students will continue to examine grade appropriate texts.
• Students will continue to determine how historical, cultural, and/or global perspectives affect the author’s style and organization.

• Teachers provide students with opportunities to read a variety of texts.
• Teachers provide students with feedback on their responses to the reading selections.

Supporting Resource

Teacher Insights

• The Literature Network (webpage) 

• This standard addresses the idea that students are thoroughly considering how the world around the author impacts the text.   

• These outside influences could be historical events, social and cultural norms and viewpoints, and prominent cultural theories, philosophies, and movements (for example, Romanticism and feminism).

• Different literary periods and theories may be helpful; for more information on these: The Literature Network.

• Based on that context, authors may make many rhetorical and style choices regarding the arrangement of the idea(s) or argument(s), the syntax, and the diction.  

• All of these choices are made for different effects including appeals to ethos, pathos, and/or logos.This standard is essentially asking students to conduct a rhetorical analysis that focuses on the rhetorical situation of the text.

• Example: Using a text that takes place during the Jim Crow era students could consider whether there was something in the author’s world (racism, the Great Depression, poverty, being raised by a single father) that affected the character development, the way in which the characters speak, the figurative language that is present, the plot conflicts, the archetypes, and/or the themes.

Activity

• Inside Out:

• After students have received direct instruction regarding historical context of literature, students will brainstorm in the first bubble what they know about the historical context of a text based on prior knowledge and direct instruction.

• Students close read an excerpt of a text and in the middle bubble they identify significant details and ideas from the text.

• In the third bubble students write about how the historical context connects with ideas in the excerpt they read.

Due to recursive nature of the standards, it is essential that teachers are aware of how all objectives within and between strands work together for optimal instruction.