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Test Specifications
Contents
Language Arts Literacy

Definitions of Content Clusters - p. 8
| Overview | Writing | Speaking | Listening | Reading | Viewing | Extending Understanding |

The ESPA, GEPA, and HSPA will invite students to approach texta (written, aural, and visual) with three different perspectives: interpreting text, analyzing and critiquing text, and extending understanding of the text.

Overview

Working with Text or Interpreting Text
Interpreting text involves activities and strategies that contribute to reformulating meaning, including:

    developing explanations and extrapolating information,
    developing specific purposes and inferring purposes, and
    planning and recognizing the organization of texts.
Analyzing and Critiquing Text
Students will be able to pose or respond to questions in ways that enhance their and others' understandings of the text.  They will predict tentative meanings of texts and plan texts as temporary thinking on their way to drawing conclusions or forming opinions. These conclusions and opinions will eventually take on more formal expressions when students move to extending understanding of text. Through this process of analysis and critique, students will understand both the functions and nuances of textual conventions and literary elements.

Extending Understanding of the Text
Students will be able to create original works. Some of these works are textual, more finished products that they can make available to specific audiences and/or for specific purposes.

Some extensions of understanding result in the reader appreciating a text or its features, considering other related texts, or interacting with others' related ideas, all of which extend literacy.

Some extensions of understanding will lead students to take action. This action will include
problem-solving, making decisions, and creating an original work, which may lead to heightened social awareness and action.

Definition of Text: The term text, as used in this directory, is consistent with the use of the term in the Language Arts Literacy component of the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards. Text refers to any printed or oral use of language. It also includes any visual communication that we "read."