Common Core Standards: ELA
Standard 4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper).
Breakin’ it Down:
This standard has two different skills disguised as one. The first is that students have to be able to figure out the meaning of a word using context clues. They’ve probably been exposed to this skill since elementary school, but you have to make sure they can do it with 9th and 10th grade texts.
The second skill in this standard is the ability to analyze the overall language patterns or style of a technical text. For informational texts, you’ll probably want to expose students to texts written for a wide range of technical audiences: art critics, car mechanics, historians, doctors, artists (or whatever floats your boat). This gives them a chance to find patterns in tone or diction across genres of writing.
Give students plenty of opportunities to analyze the different language patterns in various texts, and the effects that these have on the reader. In short, students have to be able to articulate how the audience of a particular text affects the writer’s language choice.
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Using this Standard
- 1984 Teacher Pass
- A Rose For Emily Teacher Pass
- A View from the Bridge Teacher Pass
- Animal Farm Teacher Pass
- Antigone Teacher Pass
- Beowulf Teacher Pass
- Brave New World Teacher Pass
- Fahrenheit 451 Teacher Pass
- Fences Teacher Pass
- Frankenstein Teacher Pass
- Hamlet Teacher Pass
- Heart of Darkness Teacher Pass
- Julius Caesar Teacher Pass
- Macbeth Teacher Pass
- Moby Dick Teacher Pass
- Narrative of Frederick Douglass Teacher Pass
- Oedipus the King Teacher Pass
- Of Mice and Men Teacher Pass
- Othello Teacher Pass
- Romeo and Juliet Teacher Pass
- The Aeneid Teacher Pass
- The As I Lay Dying Teacher Pass
- The Bluest Eye Teacher Pass
- The Canterbury Tales General Prologue Teacher Pass
- The Cask of Amontillado Teacher Pass
- The Catcher in the Rye Teacher Pass
- The Crucible Teacher Pass
- The House on Mango Street Teacher Pass
- The Iliad Teacher Pass
- The Odyssey Teacher Pass
- Their Eyes Were Watching God Teacher Pass
- Things Fall Apart Teacher Pass
- To Kill a Mockingbird Teacher Pass
- Twilight Teacher Pass
Teacher Feature: Ideas for the classroom
1. HATCHLING: Define a word using context clues
Once students hit high school, they have to be willing to dig deeper and read further for context clues. Give them passages where the clues to a word require reading in another paragraph, or making connections between two parts of a text. In informational writing, students can’t expect the definition of a word to always be sitting right next to the word itself.
You can create multiple-choice context clue questions with any text you have in class or find plenty of released practice tests from college entrance exams to keep students fresh.
2. TAKE FLIGHT: Do-It-Yourself
In our increasingly digital society, you can learn just about anything by pulling up an online article. A fun way to test this standard is to give students a technical document (how to make a paper airplane, how to assemble a blender, how to write a press release), and challenge them to make something or answer a quiz about the topic with only the text to guide them. It forces them to figure out the technical vocabulary and keep all their terms in order. Follow it up with a short vocab quiz on the important terms from the text.
It might seem silly, but these types of texts are becoming more frequent on standardized reading exams. With just a little bit of creativity, you can find technical documents that tie-in to your thematic units or supplement your class readings.
Quiz QuestionsHere's an example of a quiz that could be used to test this standard.
- Teaching A Rose for Emily: Write an Epitaph
- A Separate Peace: Blitzball for All
- A Separate Peace: Real History in Made-Up Devon
- Teaching A Tale of Two Cities: Serial Publishing
- Teaching A Tale of Two Cities: Mapping A Tale of Two Cities
- Teaching A View from the Bridge: Fill in the Symbol
- Teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: It Runs in the Family
- Teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The N-Word
- Teaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Huck Finn vs. Video Games
- All Quiet on the Western Front: Oh The Humanity!
- Teaching Animal Farm: You Say You Want A (R)evolution?
- Teaching Animal Farm: To Ban or Not to Ban; That is the Question
- Teaching Animal Farm: Corruption Makes the World Go Round
- Teaching Animal Farm: The Power of Words
- Teaching Antigone: On the Hunt for Civil Disobedience
- Teaching Antigone: Motif Slideshow
- Teaching Antigone: The First Three Letters of Funeral
- As I Lay Dying: Dysfunction Junction: Somebody, Help These Bundrens!
- As I Lay Dying: Telling a Story from All Sides: Experimenting with Multiple-Perspective Narration
- Teaching 1984: From Doublethink to Doublespeak
- Teaching 1984: This Is Why I Write
- Teaching 1984: It's Not Over Until the Fat Lady Sings
- A Christmas Carol: Parable Party
- A Christmas Carol: From Victorian England to Modern America
- Teaching A Farewell to Arms: If Hemingway Edited Hawthorne
- Teaching A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway and ... Yiyun Li?
- Teaching A Farewell to Arms: Touring the Novel
- Teaching A Good Man is Hard to Find: Killer Short Stories: Flannery O'Connor and Southern Gothic Literature
- Teaching Twilight: Judging a Book by its Cover
- Beloved: Back to the Source
- Teaching Beowulf: Speaking Beowulf
- Teaching Beowulf: Anglo-Saxon Word Hunt
- Teaching Beowulf: Wise Guys in Beowulf: Gnomic Verse
- Teaching Brave New World: Aldous Huxley: Oracle or Alarmist?
- Teaching Brave New World: Our Ford, Who art in ... Detroit?