This standard asks students to use evidence two ways:

When it comes to citing text evidence, we recommend that you don your drill sergeant uniform. Insist that students support their thinking with quotes from the text, whether they are writing about the text or discussing it in class. Will they get tired of it? Yes. Will they complain? Probably. But remind them that the texts they are reading in eleventh and twelfth grade are difficult and complicated. There are many potential interpretations, and you want students to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions about the text. However, they have to be able to defend their ideas. Treat your classroom like a courtroom. Require that students present evidence and build a case for any claim they make. Make it fun, but don’t back down. Your students are about to head into college, and they need to be prepared to enter those upper levels of academic dialogue. The best thing you can do is make them experts at using text evidence.

 1. Identify themes.
 2. Analyze how these themes are developed.
 3. Summarize the text.

Many readers would define theme as the life lesson or moral of the text. Love is blind. There are no winners in war. We tend to think of theme as those words of wisdom parents try to pass on while teenagers roll their eyes. However, in advanced texts, the themes are usually more complicated than a catchy life lesson and a single text often deals with more than one theme. The old “moral of the story” definition can get students into trouble here.

What should you do about this? Well, at this level, it may be helpful to think about theme as the idea or question that the author is trying to shed some light on. The text may not make a single, well-defined statement about love or war, but you can bet that it does illuminate some aspect of those big ideas. Rather than hunting for a clichéd life lesson, ask students to identify what universal ideas are being examined. By eleventh and twelfth grades, students are expected to craft original and more nuanced theme statements.

Once students have identified a theme, they’ll need to be able to discuss how that theme is developed in the text. Students will need to examine literary elements such as extended metaphors, symbolism, and motifs and show how these elements reveal the theme. They’ll need to connect the plot and the characters’ motivations and realizations to the theme. Basically, students at this level should be able to provide an in-depth analysis that demonstrates how the theme is woven into each aspect of the text. Get out the microscopes because this standard requires an up-close-and-personal reading of the text.

This is a great time to team up with your friendly, neighborhood Writing Standards for Grades 11-12 since students will need to think like writers in order to accomplish the goals of this standard.

Additionally, in the last years of high school, students should become masters of distinguishing figurative from literal language. This shouldn’t be too hard since their sarcasm skills are likely at peak performance levels, and sarcasm is just another form of non-literal language. The standard requires that students can interpret the meaning of figurative writing and identify connotative meanings or emotional resonances of words. Look out – that’s taking those familiar context clues to a whole new level.

These points of confusion are opportunities to ask students to dig further into the text. Like Standard 3, students will need to think like writers here and determine why the author made these structural choices. What is the effect on the reader? How does the structure impact our understanding of the text’s meaning? Could it be that confusion is exactly what the author wanted you to feel here? What might be the purpose for that? Hmm, we hear their wheels turning already. That “aha” moment is just ahead.

At this level, pinpointing the irony or sarcasm is all about paying attention to contextual clues. Students should be able to identify an author’s tone early on in the reading and red-flag the statements, descriptions, or sentiments that don’t seem to fit.

The standard lays out the most important literary terms that students need to know to master this one. This literary terms webpage gives a great explanation of the difference between satire, sarcasm, understatement and verbal irony under the ‘irony’ listing: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html