CATESOL 2013:
College and Career Readiness Reading Anchor 2: Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development;
summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
A
B
C
D
Identify the main topic and recall
key details of a text.
Determine the main idea of a text;
recount the key details and explain
how they support the main idea.
Determine the main idea of a text
and explain how it is supported by
key details; summarize the text.
Determine a theme or central idea
of a text and how it is conveyed
through particular details; provide
a summary of the text distinct from
personal opinions or judgments.
NRS ESL Levels
NRS ESL Level
NRS ESL Level
NRS ESL Level
Beginning Literacy, Low- and HighBeginning
Low-Intermediate
High-Intermediate
Advanced
College, Career Readiness
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more successful they change those goals. And why not give them
the skills they need, so they don’t have to learn a different skill set
when they say, “Oops! I do want to study more”?
LH: I think we’ve historically focused on listening and speaking
in the beginning levels and have left out reading and writing. It’s
important to include reading and writing tasks in the beginning
levels in ways that are relevant to students: reading a bill, reading
a headline, reading a chart. That’s going to really help them in their
lives and relate to academic needs as well.
JAG: Can you give us a preview of what you’ll be doing at the
workshop?
SR/LH: We have decided to work with reading and writing standards so that everyone at the workshop can try out using the level
descriptors to focus instruction. Hopefully, having practiced using
these standards and descriptors in the workshop, teachers will then
feel confident extrapolating what they’ve done to other standards
for future lessons. We’re integrating the reading and writing standards because research has shown how important that readingwriting connection is. Learners need to be able to draw upon and
use evidence from what they read in order to write effectively.
That’s a founding principle of the College and Career Readiness
Standards—of all the research that’s out there on reading and writing. In the College and Career Standards for Adult Education, it
says, “Writing Standard 9 is a standout because it stresses the importance of the writing-reading connection by requiring students
to draw upon and use evidence from literary and informational
texts as they write arguments or inform/explain.” The Writing to
Read study by Steve Graham and Michael Hebert (funded by the
Carnegie Corporation in 2010) gives three main reasons why this
connection is so important:
1. Reading and writing are both functional activities that can be
combined to accomplish specific goals.
2. Reading and writing are connected as they draw upon common knowledge and cognitive processes (work on one, you
are actually working on the other).
3. Reading and writing are both communication activities and
writers should gain more understanding about reading by developing their own texts.
12 • CATESOL NEWS • FALL 2013
This is a workshop for instructors with beginning, intermediate, and/or advanced learners and we plan to have materials for
every level. We’ll model the instructional planning process for one
level and then have participants work in their level-alike groups
with their appropriate level descriptors, published materials, and
planning templates. We’ll be handing out a fair amount of materials because we want to emphasize that College and Career Readiness Standards do not call for teachers to spend hours re-creating
and reinventing. There is a lot of good material out there for us to
use. We’ll be demonstrating how, in most cases, it’s possible to
work with ready-made texts and simply tweak or adapt questions,
activities, and tasks in order to build the skills learners need. Together we’ll look at the standard, look at the key descriptors that
meet the standard, review the materials to determine what applies
to the standard, and then consider what needs to be adapted to meet
the standard. A majority of the time will be spent with teachers
working together—we’re really workshopping the process!
JAG: This sounds like a great professional-development opportunity. Is there anything else you’d like your potential audience to
know?
SR: In preparing this workshop, Lori and I are responding to the
need from the field, but we don’t want to respond theoretically.
We want to respond practically. We’re asking ourselves, “How can
you go home from this workshop, and on Monday morning begin
to examine and teach to these important standards, not because it’s
a federal priority, but because it’s a priority for your students to be
more successful?”
LH: Best quote ever, Sylvia. And I would like to add that so many
of the sessions on standards that I’ve seen have tended toward the
theoretical, giving the history, explaining how they will affect programs. Our goal is to approach the standards in a way that demystifies them and makes them easy to use.
JAG: Even if I weren’t Adult Level chair, I’d want to be there!
And I hope adult ESL practitioners throughout the state will join
me. Once again, “Building College and Career Readiness ... From
the Start” is at 1:15 p.m. Saturday, October 26, in the California
room, directly following the Adult Level Rap (that starts at noon).
See you there!