English Language Arts

SUHSD ELA Mission Statement

We are literacy teachers who strive to develop students’ ability to  read, write, and communicate with competence and confidence.  We will provide access to relevant and powerful  literature, informational texts and other media that widen perspectives, illuminate the human experience, and deepen understandings of self and others. Through a rhetorical approach, we teach students to access the thinking of others—their knowledge, perspectives, questions, and passions— and to share, ponder, and pursue their own. District-wide, we have accomplished our goals when, with positive dispositions toward learning, students:
  • Attain the capacities of literate individuals
  • Become broadly literate
  • Develop the readiness for college, careers, and civic life
  • Acquire the skills for living and learning in the 21st century
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Circles of Implementation from the CA ELA/ELD Framework

Circles of Implementation from the CA ELA/ELD Framework

Capacities of literate individuals:
  • They demonstrate independence.
  • They build strong content knowledge.
  • They respond to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.
  • They comprehend as well as critique.
  • They value evidence.
  • They use technology and digital media strategically and capably.
  • They come to understand other perspectives and cultures.

Becoming Broadly Literate: Reading for pleasure, for information, for inspiration and to communicate responsively is necessary in today’s global society. A person who is broadly literate engages with a wide range of books and texts across a variety of genres, time periods, cultures, perspectives, and topics. Texts are formal and informal; they include picture books, chapter books, textbooks, song lyrics, plays, short stories, poems, essays, speeches, websites, blogs, social media, advertisements, graphic novels, newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. They also include performances, such as dramas, musicals, concerts, poetry and spoken word, dance, opera, news programs, and more. A person who is broadly literate enjoys texts for the pleasure they bring, the ideas they convey, the information they impart, the wisdom they offer, and the possibilities they uncover.

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