Spoken Language Skills: Participating in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners and building on others’ ideas. Expressing ideas clearly and persuasively. Presenting diverse media formats visually, quantitatively, and orally. Adapting speech to varied contexts and communicative tasks. Demonstrating command of formal English when appropriate. Making strategic use of digital media and visual displays to express information and audience understanding. 

Comprehension: Evaluating a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric to support perspective. Developing critical questions to stoke peer discussion. Organizing ideas and information through the practice of note-taking. Identifying pertinent ideas to build robust research from a variety of sources. Gathering information from print and digital sources to assess credibility and accuracy. 

Reading & Literature: Determining text theme and citing evidence while drawing inferences. Analyzing how dialogue and plot propel action and reveal characters. Analyzing how a text makes connections and distinctions among individuals, ideas, and events. Interpreting figurative, connotative, and technical meaning through context clues. Analyzing word choice and tone to decide the author's intent. Identifying analogies and allusions to other texts. Determining the intended audience and author bias. Assessing the strength of claims based on evidence. Analyzing conflicting texts side by side. 

Written Language: Writing arguments to support claims using reasoning and evidence. Writing explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas clearly through organization and analysis of content. Writing narratives to develop real or imagined experiences using details and well-structured event sequences. Writing and producing research papers and projects based on focused questions that demonstrate an understanding of the subject under investigation. Synthesizing ideas, justifying conclusions, and translating sources into own words to avoid plagiarism. Organizing ideas by introducing a topic, giving supporting ideas, and providing a conclusion. Using transitions to create cohesion. Choosing appropriate language and vocabulary. Citing textual evidence to support analysis. Producing clear writing in which the development, organization, and style reflect task, purpose, and audience. Executing, often with the use of technology, planning, collaborating, revising, and editing as all part of the writing process. Self and Peer editing for subject-verb agreement, punctuation, capitalization, and consistent verb tense.