A New Jersey education in English Language Arts builds readers, writers, and communicators prepared to meet the demands of college and career and to engage as productive American citizens with global responsibilities. Throughout their kindergarten through grade 12 experience, students will:

• Develop the necessary skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening that are the foundations for creative and purposeful expression in language.
• Read rich, challenging texts that build their knowledge of the world, grow their confidence and identities as readers, and develop critical thinking skills and vocabulary necessary for long-term success.
• Engage in regular, meaningful, writing authentic tasks, exploring valued topics, writing for impact and expression, and sharing their work with others (including authentic audiences).
• Leverage complex texts and digital media to develop comprehension, active listening, and discussion skills.
• Ground daily writing and discussion in evidence, fostering an ability to read critically, build arguments, cite evidence, and communicate ideas to contribute meaningfully as productive citizens.
• Evaluate the reliability, credibility, and perspective of authors and speakers across all forms of media.
• Express ideas and knowledge through a variety of modalities and media, and serve as effective communicators who purposefully read, write, and speak across multiple disciplines.
• Learn to persist in reading complex texts, establishing lifelong habits to read voluntarily for pleasure, for further education, for information on public policy, and for advancement in the workplace.

The English Language Arts Practices offer the capacities held by students who have progressed through a kindergarten through grade 12 English Language Arts program in New Jersey. These practices describe students who are proficient in literacy, possessing the abilities to read deeply, create their own works, and listen and speak to a broad range of ideas. As New Jersey students advance through the grades and demonstrate proficiency in the standards in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language, they are able to exhibit with increasing fullness and regularity the following capacities of the literate individual.

Student capacities include:

• Developing Responsibility for Learning: Cultivating independence, self-reflection, and responsibility for one’s own learning.
• Adapting Communication: Adapting communication in response to the varying demands of audience, task, purpose, and discipline.
• Valuing Evidence in Argumentation: Constructing viable claims and evaluating, defending, challenging, and qualifying the arguments of others.
• Building Knowledge: Building strong content knowledge and connecting ideas across disciplines using a variety of text resources and media.
• Leveraging Technology: Employing technology and digital media thoughtfully, strategically and capably to enhance reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language use.
• Understanding Self and Others: Using literacy as a vehicle to affirm all the aspects of one’s own identity, as well as understand, connect to and respect other perspectives and cultures.

Anchor Statements are designed to identify the domain-specific knowledge, skills, and abilities students will acquire throughout a kindergarten through grade twelve education in English language arts necessary for their postsecondary success. Each of the anchor statements nested within the four domains (Language, Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening) describes the endpoint of a developmental progression that, in concert with the performance expectations at each grade level, outlines the knowledge and skills that students acquire at each grade level and how these concepts build upon each other over time.

Language: System and structure, effective use, and vocabulary

The Language anchor statements include the system and structure of English, but they also approach language as a matter of craft and informed choice among alternatives. The vocabulary standards focus on understanding words and phrases, their relationships, and their nuances and on acquiring new vocabulary, particularly general academic and domain-specific words and phrases.

Reading: Text complexity and the growth of comprehension

The Reading anchor statements place equal emphasis on the sophistication of what students read and the skill with which they read. They define a grade-by-grade “staircase” of increasing text complexity that rises from beginning reading to the college and career readiness level. Whatever they are reading, students must also show a steadily growing ability to discern more from and make fuller use of text, including making an increasing number of connections among ideas and between texts, considering a wider range of textual evidence, and becoming more sensitive to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and poor reasoning in texts.

Writing: Text types, responding to reading, and research

The Writing anchor statements acknowledge the fact that whereas some writing skills, such as the ability to plan, revise, edit, and publish, are applicable to many types of writing, other skills are more properly defined in terms of specific writing types: arguments, informative/explanatory texts, and narratives. They stress the importance of the writing-reading connection by requiring students to draw upon and write about evidence from literary and informational texts. Because of the centrality of writing to most forms of inquiry, research standards are prominently included in this strand, though skills important to research are infused throughout the document.

Speaking and Listening: Flexible communication and collaboration

Including but not limited to skills necessary for formal presentations, the Speaking and Listening anchor statements require students to develop a range of broadly useful oral communication and interpersonal skills. Students must learn to work together, express and listen carefully to ideas, integrate information from oral, visual, quantitative, and media sources, evaluate what they hear, use media and visual displays strategically to help