California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template

The article “Assignment Template Aligned to California’s Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy,” is a helpful template that would give support to the California teachers as a guide to help themselves out, and for other states to gather information on their core state standards. Therefore, some useful tips that I found out would be reading rhetorically, which means to “focus not only on what the text says but also on the purposes it serves, the intentions of the author, and the effects on the audience” (4). This idea allows the teacher to scaffold these practices to help their students maximize the fluency with language and develop readers, writers, and thinkers within them. Also, I found the prereading tips to be helpful as it gives teachers some good ideas to help their students understand the book more clearly before reading. Some of those ideas were to “make a connection between their own personal world and the world of the text,” and “activate or develop prior knowledge and experience related to the issues addressed in the text,” also “share their knowledge relevant to the text,” as well “consider their opinions or biases before reading,” and “set purposes for reading,” lastly “begin to formulate the issue their writing will address” (4). All these ideas will be helpful for future teachers to use, including myself. Also, another good idea that I thought was interesting would have to be annotating and questioning the text, which my prior high-school teachers and college teachers used this strategy. Not only is the strategy helpful for teachers, but the teachers can encourage their students to do the same. This allows the students to personally connect to the author’s point and it allows them to reflect on the evidence or examples within the text. Also, annotating will allow the students to often ask questions about the author’s ideas or assumptions or even the challenges that he inferences or concluded. Lastly, I enjoyed the tips about Postreading which allows your students to summarize certain text with groupmates working together creating paragraphs that give main points within the text.