Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Language Arts Education Curriculum

Language arts education curricula are the sets of materials and practices generally used in the preparation of pre- and inservice PreK8 educators for engaging children and youth with the subject matter, pedagogical practices, and current debates related to the commonly accepted strands of language arts, which include reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visual representation. This topic is relevant to the field of curriculum studies because the language arts remain the most foundationaland potentially most controversialof curricular emphases addressed within any PreK8 school setting. This encyclopedia entry provides a definition of English language arts education curricula, including an overview of their most commonly recognized elements; brief discussions of the primary assumptions, theories, and curricular standards associated with this element of curriculum; cursory examinations of historical and recent debates and controversies related to this field of curriculum studies; and descriptions of examples of four of the key strands included in language arts education curricula.

Definition

Although language arts education might be taught with a focus on any language (e.g., Spanish language arts education or Chinese language arts education), in the United States it is assumed that one is considering the English language when speaking of a language arts education curriculum. Of course, in the United Stateswith an increasingly diverse population, including higher percentages of non native English speakerstraditional language arts education curricula frequently include considerations of the needs, abilities, and skills related to other languages.

Language arts education curricula are generally differentiated from English education curricula by both the grade levels toward which these subject matters are oriented and the range of subtopics that are included in each. The language arts are generally organized as discrete courses of study taught in elementary through middle or junior high school (PreK8) grades; these courses are distinct from English courses (generally taught in high school settings) in that language arts curricula include a holistic integration of all of the elements listed above (i.e., reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visual representation), of which two are written, two are visual, and two are oral. In addition, in the grades in which the language arts are taught, it is commonly recognized that these topics and skills are integrated within and across subjects (e.g., science or social studies), even if these are also taught as discrete courses. As students progress to high school, these integrated language arts are isolated into distinct courses and curricula, each of which might focus remotely on literature, composition, speech, debate, drama, video, multimedia, or related courses.

Assumptions, Theories, and Standards

Several assumptions and theories lie at the heart of the nature of language arts education curricula. These include the belief that the upper elementary and middle school (Grades 48) youth who are the primary audiences for language arts curricula are developmentally unique and benefit from an inte-grative approach to curricula and teaching practices. As with many fields of curriculum, the features of language arts education curricula are the outgrowth of a set of psychological characteristics believed to be most prevalent among upper elementary and middle school children.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution