English Language Arts and Reading.7.11.D

The student is expected to

compose correspondence that reflects an opinion, registers a complaint, or requests information in a business or friendly structure.

composition strand teks talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Composition: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts--genres. The student uses genre characteristics and craft to compose multiple texts that are meaningful.

Task students with composing their own correspondence. For example, students can respond to a newspaper article or an online blog with their opinions.
 

Further Explanation

This SE requires students to share their opinions with an audience outside of those they are familiar with and for purposes that require a consideration of tone. The method of correspondence should correlate with the purpose of the communication and could include a business or a friendly letter, a blog post, or an email. Students’ writing is expected to be organized and coherent and include a greeting, a body, and a closing.

Correspondence is any written or digital communication exchanged between two or more people in the form of a letter or e-mail. Students in this grade should begin writing correspondence to audiences outside of those familiar to them and for purposes that require careful consideration of tone. For example, students in this grade could write to elected officials, city leaders, or school administrators and need to know how to establish a more formal tone than they would use in an informal note to a friend. Student writing should be organized and coherent and include a greeting, a body, and a closing.

Research

VanDerHeide, J., &  Juzwik, M. M. (2018). Argument as conservation: Students responding through writing to significant conversations across time and place. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(1), 67–77. doi: 10.1002/jaal.754  

Summary: When students are tasked with writing in a particular form, students often lose focus on why they are writing. More emphasis is placed on whether each component of the form is included. In this article, the author presents an instructional model that reconnects to the why of writing. The model of information reasoning requires students to learn how to make claims, provide supporting evidence of that claim, and create additional examples of the claim through the use of analogies and stories. In this study, students were asked to write a letter in response to an ongoing conversation that was important to them. The experience helped to develop the students' ability to advocate for a position through writing. The approach requires scaffolding on argumentative writing instruction. This study includes multiple templates to guide the writing of the responses. This approach fosters the opportunity for students to participate in conversations that have a historical background. In doing so, students engage in topics of debate that have continued over time and in various spaces. Students are invited to participate in these discussions through their writing positions as arguing for or against a position.