1. Alignment of standards to structured literacy and science of reading
Building knowledge through content rich non-‐fiction plays an essential role in literacy and in the Standards. In K-5, fulfilling the standards requires a 50-50 balance between informational and literary reading. Informational reading primarily includes content rich non-fiction in history/social studies, science and the arts; the K-‐5 Standards strongly recommend that students build coherent general knowledge both within each year and across years. In 6-12, ELA classes place much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional. In grades 6-12, the Standards for literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects ensure that students can independently build knowledge in these disciplines through reading and writing.
To be clear, the Standards do require substantial attention to literature throughout K-12, as half of the required work in K-5 and the core of the work of 6-12 ELA teachers.
2. Complex text
Rather than focusing solely on the skills of reading and writing, the Standards highlight the growing complexity of the texts students must read for the demands of post secondary success.
Closely related to text complexity—and inextricably connected to reading comprehension—is not only a focus on academic vocabulary: words that appear in a variety of academi areas (such as ignite and commit).
Likewise, the reading standards focus on students’ ability to read carefully and grasp information, arguments, ideas and details based on text evidence. Students should be able to answer a range of text-‐dependent questions, questions in which the answers require inferences based on careful attention to the text.
3. Text Sets to draw conclusions and create background knowledge
With the addition of RL/RI 9, students are required to read multiple texts. A text set is 3-10 pieces of text (e.g. non-fiction text, narrative text, poetry, realia, photographs, videos, etc.) The text set will