Language Arts 700 Course Overview

Language Arts 700 continues to build on the sequential development and integration of communication skills in four major areas—reading, writing, speaking, and listening. It most specifically focuses on deepening and furthering students' understanding in the following ways:

• Reading–develops students’ reading skills, including the identification of main ideas, supporting details, and sequence; teaches students how to reach logical conclusions as well as use appropriate reading rates; shows students how to identify parts of speech in sentences, with emphasis on adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and verb types; helps students develop basic literary comprehension skills through the reading of biographical and autobiographical pieces, poetry, and character analyses.
• Writing–develops students’ understanding of sentence structure, providing hands-on experience with coordination, conjunctions, subject-verb agreement, participles, and phrases; familiarizes students with roots, affixes, and basic word relationships, including homonyms, synonyms, and antonyms; develops students’ vocabulary and spelling skills; gives students the opportunity to develop their abilities in writing paragraphs, character analyses, character sketches, short biographies, and summaries; develops students’ critical thinking skills through speculative writing on morality.
• Speaking–teaches skills that enable students to become effective speakers and communicators, weaving the skills together throughout the course.
• Listening–teaches effective listening comprehension skills, weaving these together throughout the lessons; builds upon students' study skills.