11-12L4a

Description: Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies. Use context (e.g., the overall meaning of a sentence, paragraph, or text; a word’s position or function in a sentence) as a clue to the meaning of a word or phrase.
Maps to Reading Plus skills: 4A, 4B

Exemplars

4A: Interpreting Word Meaning

4A: Interpreting Word Meaning

Description: Interpreting Word Meaning

SeeReader
✓ standard met

Selection: L-26

L-26

Grade level: 12
Word count: 2743 words
Author: Virginia Woolf
Synopsis: What goes on in a public garden on a lovely summer day? A lot more than you may think.
Excerpt: Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad.

Question: Based upon the following excerpt, the word "betokening" most closely means
  1. indicating.
  2. denying.
  3. practicing.
  4. discarding.

Writing
✓ standard met

Writing prompt: Explain how a character's actions or attitude can change the meaning of a word or phrase.

Evaluator

Organization: Certica Solutions

4B: Interpreting Analogies

4B: Interpreting Analogies

Description: Interpreting Analogies

SeeReader
✓ standard met

Selection: L-21

L-21

Grade level: 12
Word count: 3146 words
Author: Stephen Crane
Synopsis: Four men, trapped in a small boat after their ship sinks, face an uncertain future.
Excerpt: A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking bronco, and by the same token, a bronco is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high.

Question: The narrator compares sitting in the lifeboat to
  1. riding a wild horse.
  2. running through a dark, unfamiliar woods.
  3. falling from a cliff.
  4. sitting in a speeding carriage.

Writing
✓ standard met

Writing prompt: Describe how an author can use figurative language to create suspense and give an example from a selection.

Evaluator

Organization: Certica Solutions