TEKS Talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Response skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed.
A response is appropriate when it is logically connected to the topic in question and uses sufficient text evidence as justification. Students are expected to write responses that are pertinent to the lesson or concept being taught and that follow the specific purpose of the task. For example, students may be asked to write an argumentative essay after reading two articles that present two different reviews on a newly released movie.
Students are expected to use information directly from texts to justify their responses. When responding to a text, students need to make sure that they are correctly interpreting the author's purpose and the content when using text evidence to support an interpretation or inference. It is important that students understand their responses must be based on actual ideas presented in a text and not on their personal opinions about the topic being discussed. That's why they need to link their own reasoning to the information contained in a text.

Research

Olson, C. B., Land, R., Anselmi,T., &  AuBuchon, C. (2010). Teaching secondary English learners to understand, analyze, and write interpretive essays about theme. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(4), 245–256. doi:10.1598/JA AL.54.4.2

Summary: This study reveals the results of a collaborative project with the California Writing Project and a large, urban, low‐SES school district where 93% of the students speak English as a second language and 69% are designated Limited English Proficient. The article describes a longitudinal study related to the impact of ongoing professional development centered on strategies used to teach student to comprehend, analyze, and write interpretive essays about themes. Fifty-five teachers and 2000 students participated in study. The students showed significant improvement in comprehending and analyzing themes.