Delaware English Language Arts/Literacy Standards (ELA)
The K–12 grade-specific State Standards define and clarify end-of-year expectations and a cumulative progression designed to enable students to meet college and career readiness expectations no later than the end of high school. By emphasizing required achievements, the Standards leave room for teachers, curriculum developers, and states to determine how those goals should be reached over the course of the year and therefore are limited in their ability to provide a clear roadmap for teachers to guide rigorous instruction. As a consequence, the State Standards must be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the articulated expectations to provide this instructional roadmap.
The Reading Standards for Foundational Skills (K-5) are directed toward fostering students’ understanding and working knowledge of concepts of print, the alphabetic principle, and other basic conventions of the English writing system. These foundational skills are not an end in and of themselves; rather, they are necessary and important components of an effective, comprehensive reading program designed to develop proficient readers with the capacity to comprehend texts across a range of types and disciplines.
The appendices of the State Standards provide teachers as well as curriculum and assessment writers the kind of guidance needed to ensure that the level of rigor of reading and writing instruction and quality of reading content remains high and therefore careful study of them is required to be well-versed in meeting the instructional demands of the ELA/Literacy State Standards. (Note: These appendices appear at the end of the full document as well as the links provided below.)
Appendix A This appendix provides research demonstrating that while complexity of reading demands for college and careers have risen over the past 50 years, the complexity of the texts students are exposed to has decreased.
Supplemental Information for Appendix A of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy: New Research on Text Complexity: This supplement provides new research on text complexity along with explanations of how to measure using the three parts of the text complexity triangle.
Appendix B consists of text exemplars illustrating the complexity, quality, and range of reading appropriate for various grade levels and disciplines with accompanying sample performance tasks. The text samples primarily serve to exemplify the level of complexity and quality that the Standards require all students in a given grade band to engage with. Additionally, they are suggestive of the breadth of texts that students should encounter in the text types required by the Standards. The choices should serve as useful guideposts in helping educators select texts of similar complexity, quality, and range for their own classrooms. They expressly do not represent a partial or complete reading list. The text exemplars are supplemented by brief performance tasks that further clarify the meaning of the Standards. These sample tasks illustrate specifically the application of the Standards to texts of sufficient complexity, quality, and range.
Appendix C includes annotated samples demonstrating at least adequate performance in to illustrate the criteria required to meet the State Standards for particular types of student writing- argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative - in a given grade.
