Common Core Standards: The Role Of Nonfiction In Education

In Francine Prose’ paper, “I know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read”, Prose describes why many high school student dislike reading literature that the American education system has preached. The premise of her essay is that today’s high school English classes are largely flawed in both material and teaching method. Prose contends that these practices are damaging to the students’ understanding and appreciation of literature. She harshly critiques the quality of required reading in American high schools and suggests a reconsideration of the English curriculum. She challenges the audience to acknowledge the curriculum’s impact on high school students and urges the audience to consider how it may addressed. Prose crafts her argument by using an appeal to logos, asking rhetorical questions and employing negative connotation.

She does not understand why the older and well-known authors are not being read in high school. Prose uses a personal experience from her son’s sophomore English class. He had to read a “weeper and former bestseller by Judith Guest” (424), about a dysfunctional family dealing with a teenage son’s suicide attempt. “No instructor has ever asked my sons to read Alice Munro, who writes so lucidly and beautifully about the hypersensitivity that makes adolescence a hell,”(424). She again mentions books she approves of that should be read in English classes.

During my field experience class this past Fall semester, as I observed a class of 4th graders at George Washington Carver Elementary, I had the opportunity to sit in as the students spent some time in the library with the school librarian, Mrs. Williams. Although I was technically there to observe the regular classroom teacher, the brief amount of time I spent in the library was inspiring to say the least. I watched as the students excitedly told Mrs. Williams and their peers about the books they were reading and how much they were enjoying them. They were so excited about reading, in fact, that they were appalled when I regrettably admitted that I wasn’t currently reading a book. For these students, reading was something that everybody should be doing, and they weren’t accepting any excuses (Believe me, I tried in vain to explain why I wasn’t reading a book). In no time at all, it

Two studies were conducted on the effects that nonfiction text have on struggling and non struggling students. According to Liebfreund & Conradi (2016) and Kuhn, Rausch, McCarty, Montgomery, & Rule (2015), the studies concluded that utilizing nonfiction text in primary grades has a positive impact on student engagement, reading comprehension, and vocabulary achievement, and decoding efficiency, vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, and intrinsic motivation all influence nonfiction text comprehension. Readability of nonfiction text also has an impact on how well students understand nonfiction text. Teachers must be aware of reading levels of nonfiction text being used in the classroom (Gallagher, Fazio, & Gunning,

As the English Department moves forward to approve literary selections for the upcoming school year, including Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson will contribute to the challenging yet engaging text selections students will already read. As we examine the transitional period from intermediate to high school there is dramatic change for many, therefore, teaching the novel Speak aligned with the common core is developmentally appropriate and will appeal to the incoming freshmen’s because it introduces topics that are of interest to them. The format of the novel Speak; the way it reads and the way it is written appeals to students, as they are able to understand the thoughts of the main character and embark on subject matter that provides students

I’m Sean Scannell, and I’m a second semester senior here at Worcester State. I’m an English major who formerly had a minor in secondary education, but instead I now seek to obtain my initial licensure in education through field work experience, as opposed to through the school’s licensure program. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on since I was young. I practically grew up in my town’s local library, and find myself still fond of authors I read from as a teenager, namely Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Dan Brown, John Green, J.K. Rowling, and many other commercial writers.

During a person’s time as a young student, they begin to acquire certain skills, such as reading. As these skills develop, the student reading establishes preferences on which genres they like to read. However, this does not mean the student should isolate themselves to only reading one genre of book. Rather, this means that the student should continue to explore different genres while their preferences expand and grow. With this in mind, older students, such as eighth graders, should read more nonfiction. In eighth grade Language Arts, it is important for students to read nonfiction because it educates them on the current issues in the world, it helps them learn how they would respond to certain real-life situations they may encounter, and

I was initially attracted to the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) because I discovered that within its English major there is a creative writing program, which appeals to my desire to continue studying literature while at the same time developing my skills and exploring my creativity as a writer. The program within the major involves multiple workshops and tutorials on both poetry and fiction, which can provide me with the independence and flexibility to learn by writing original content and develop my own portfolio of work. Furthermore, courses within the LSA’s English major are very diverse, ranging from Intro to Autobiography to Native American Literature. This diversity will help me form a strong foundation in literature through the study of works from many eras, genres, and styles. This exposure to such a diversity of literature will also help me hone in on what style of writing I like the best and want to continue to study in my future academic career as well as in personal projects.

Clugston, R. W. (2010). Journey into literature. San Diego, California: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. Retrieved from

The textbook that teachers in grades sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grade at Wanye-Finger Lakes BOCES are utilizing Expert 21: Reading, Writing and Thinking for the Twenty-first Century (2010) textbook for their Middle School English Language Arts Curriculum. This textbook was published by Scholastic and is utilized as the curriculum that teachers are required to teach and modify as needed. The textbook is divided into eight workshops that present students with real-world themes. There are a total of three courses with two textbooks that align with each of the three courses.

I like that you are taking your work from a previous class and enhancing it, adding more weight to the overall experience. From what I gather of your intentions, you have big questions concerning how singular realities from singular perspectives can live amongst one another without contention and criticism. The specificity of your topic and how integral the subject of your topic, Klancie, is to you as a her lover, as someone who is examining her experience and then translating it to paper and into the reader’s reality is wild with creative intrigue and possibility. Reality deconstructed so many times, put through so many filters—is it still perfect and understandable to the world, to their own understanding of reality? As you know, I love these questions. Within your proposal, you continuously philosophize about nonfiction’s golden rules and purpose.

That last unit we did was fairly hard. I didn’t do very well because I didn’t take it seriously. As the unit went on, I realized I need to take it seriously. I fooled around too much. In seventh grade we did a little bit of nonfiction, but it can be hard to remember that far back. Again, as the unit went on I studied more. Studying the essential now that we are in High School!

A genre approach is a different way of looking at writing. Genre means different types of writing; it refers to the overall structure and purpose of a text and the register which is more concerned with details (Collerson, 1988). A genre approach views how language is used for the particular purpose in the particular context (Martin, 1992). Genre-based literacy pedagogy is divided into three stages in the

The American literary education system is one that has remained relatively consistent for the last few decades. The typical process which students follow as they progress through their years of primary and secondary education is one that is designed to teach them about the history of our society as well as how they may be able to express their creative thoughts and ideas in the same way so many authors in the past have. To determine which books are used in this system of education, curriculums often look towards the American literary canon, which is a collection of books that are considered to be the most important and influential during the time period of their release. For example, novels taught in American schools like To Kill A Mockingbird

Creative nonfiction is called by many names such as literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, literary journalism, and imaginative nonfiction. These are just some of the very many given names of creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction is nonfiction that is still well researched and puts the reader in the situation of that time period and reads like fiction. The comparison of creative nonfiction and nonfiction will be discussed and will be dissected into the differences and common ground of both. The real-world applications that are applied to see which one is most used in which environment. Then we will ask peers which they preferred and why.