COS (course of study standards)

Eighth Grade

Students in Grade 8 broaden their ability to combine prior knowledge with new information. They are given frequent opportunities to enhance skills in reading, writing, discussing, and giving oral reports. Students become more proficient in revising and editing as they master grammar and usage concepts. They also continue to develop the necessary self-confidence for meeting the expectations of high school.

Students benefit when teachers in all subject areas coordinate instruction in a manner that allows them to see relationships among subject areas. This helps them become more cognizant of the need for good writing skills, not only in the area of English language arts, but also in all other subject areas. These experiences encourage students to become more adept in their communication skills.

Minimum Required Content

Students will:

Reading

    1.    Apply strategies, including making inferences to determine theme, confirming or refuting predictions, and using specific context clues, to comprehend eighth-grade recreational reading materials.

·     Applying self-monitoring strategies for text understanding

·     Distinguishing fact from fiction to enhance understanding

·     Determining sequence in recreational reading materials

    2.    Evaluate the impact of setting, mood, and characterization on theme in specific literary selections.

·     Identifying components of plot

    3.    Distinguish among the subcategories of poetry, such as ballads, lyric poems, epics, haiku, and limericks, based on their characteristics.

·     Identifying rhythm and rhyme scheme

    4.    Apply strategies appropriate to type of reading material, including making inferences to determine bias or theme and using specific context clues, to comprehend eighth-grade informational and functional reading materials.

·     Applying self-monitoring strategies for text understanding

·     Comparing predicted with actual content in informational and functional reading materials

·     Distinguishing fact from opinion in informational reading materials

·     Confirming author’s credentials

·     Determining sequence of steps, events, or information

Literature

    5.    Explain distinguishing characteristics of odes, ballads, epic poetry, historical documents, essays, letters to the editor, and editorials.

    6.    Analyze works of literature for character motivation, mood, tone, theme, similarities across texts, and literary devices.

Writing and Language

    7.    Compose a business letter, including heading, inside address, salutation, body, closing, and signature.

    8.    Write in narrative, expository, and persuasive modes with attention to descriptive elements.

Examples: descriptive elements—sensory detail, figurative language, spatial relationships

    9.    Apply mechanics in writing, including using quotation marks, underlining, and italics to punctuate titles and using semicolons, conjunctive adverbs, and commas to join two independent clauses or to correct run-on sentences.

·     Demonstrating correct sentence structure by avoiding comma splices in writing

·     Using commas to set off nonessential clauses and appositives in writing

 10.    Use prepositional phrases and compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences to vary sentence structure.

Example:   determining variety in sentence structure by diagramming or identifying patterns in selected sentences

·     Using gerunds, infinitives, and participles in writing

·     Recognizing active and passive voice in writing

·     Applying subject-verb agreement rules with collective nouns, nouns compound in form but singular in meaning, compound subjects joined by correlative and coordinating conjunctions, and subjects plural in form but singular in meaning

 11.    Write sentence patterns common to English construction.

Examples: subject→verb (S→V)
subject→action verb→direct object (S→AV→DO)
subject→action verb→indirect object→direct object       (S→AV→IO→DO)
subject→linking verb→predicate nominative (S→LV→PN)
subject→linking verb→predicate adjective (S→LV→PA)

 12.    Identify the correct use of degrees of comparison, adjectives and adverb forms, and subject-verb agreement with collective nouns when verb forms depend on the rest of the sentence and with compound subjects, including those joined by or with the second element as singular or plural.

·     Recognizing parallelism in phrases and clauses

Research and Inquiry

 13.    Combine all aspects of the research process to compose a report.

Examples: outline, rough draft, editing, final copy, works-cited page

·     Taking notes to gather and summarize information

·     Using paraphrasing and documentation of sources to avoid plagiarism

Oral and Visual Communication

 14.    Identify characteristics of spoken formal and informal language.

Examples: formal—Standard English, no slang
informal—dialect, slang