HS Spanish Guide

What could this look like in practices in grades K–5?*

ACT Readiness Standards: Snapshot of Expected Skills

Utah Core Standards: Snapshot of Expected Skills

Category

instructional focus on producing an authentic product (e.g., writing an essay). Although students do not compose a written response on the ACT English subtest, the skills they have developed through the Utah writing standards will help them in selecting the appropriate corrections or revisions on the English subtest. 3.L.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate conversational, general academic, and domain specific words and phrases, including those that signal spatial and time relationships. 4.L.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal precise actions, emotions, or states of being and that are basic to a particular topic. 5.L.6 Acquire and use accurately grade-appropriate general academic and domain-specific words and phrases, including those that signal contrast, addition, and other logical relationships. 5.L.1.f Use correlative conjunctions.

* Additional ideas for instructional practices can be found in the resource Ideas for Progress in College and Career Readiness on the ACT website.

Knowledge of Language (KLA) Questions in this category test how well students choose precise and appropriate words and images; maintain the level of style and tone in an essay; manage sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness; and avoid ambiguous pronoun references, wordiness, and redundancy.

KLA 403 Determine the need for conjunctions to create straightforward logical links between clauses KLA 404 Use the word or phrase most appropriate in terms of the content of the sentence when the vocabulary is relatively common

Provide students with a paragraph containing only simple sentences. Have students work in pairs to combine the sentences into compound and complex sentences by adding appropriate conjunctions. Try out different words in a draft; discuss the words’ connotations and effect on meaning. Begin building capacity for conjunctions as transitional terms. Use the anchors of “and,” “but,” and “so” to begin charting synonyms more commonly used as transitional terms. Build students’ academic vocabulary by presenting them with content rich complex texts.

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