The following process was used to identify standards and benchmarks for English Language Arts:

Identification of Significant Reports
The language arts standards address basic knowledge and skills in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and viewing. Federally funded efforts to develop language arts standards were never completed. Specifically, federal funding halted for the Standards Projects for the English Language Arts (SPELA) as of March 1994. One complete draft document survived that effort, the Incomplete Work of the Task Forces of the Standards Project for English Language Arts (1994). It identified standards in five broad areas referred to as strands. The document was the product of a joint effort of the Center for the Study of Reading (CSR) at the University of Illinois, the International Reading Association (IRA), and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). When funding for SPELA was halted in 1994, NCTE and IRA continued their joint effort to produce language arts standards. In 1996, NCTE and IRA published their unsponsored standards in the work Standards for the English Language Arts. It identified 12 broadly articulated standards that cover such skills and abilities as reading a wide range of literature, using a variety of writing strategies, developing an appreciation for differing language patterns and dialects, and applying knowledge of such conventions as spelling and punctuation to create texts. However, the document does not identify specific elements of information and skill as benchmarks for the standards. Rather, the benchmarks that define the specific content within each standard must be inferred from four documents that provide vignettes of how the standards might be addressed at different grade levels.

*   Standards in Practice: Grades K-2 (Crafton, 1996)
*   Standards in Practice: Grades 3-5 (Sierra-Perry, 1996)
*   Standards in Practice: Grades 6-8 (Wilhelm, 1996)
*   Standards in Practice: Grades 9-12 (Smagorinsky, 1996)

In addition to the NCTE/IRA documents, a number of other documents contain explicit and implicit descriptions of language arts standards; together, they provide a rather comprehensive source of information for identifying standards in the English language arts. The most explicit of these are documents produced by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) as a part of its 1992 assessment efforts. In the area of writing, NAEP has produced the Writing Framework and Specifications for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (n.d.). This document provides descriptions of basic, proficient, and advanced levels of performance at three levels: grade 4, grade 8, and grade 12. The performance levels represent fairly straightforward descriptions of what students should know and be able to do in writing. In reading, NAEP has produced the Reading Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress: 1992-2000 (n.d.). This document provides explicit statements of what students should know and be able to do relative to the process of reading and identifies the types of materials students should be able to read at various levels. Other sources of explicit descriptions of knowledge and skills students should acquire within the language arts include documents from the Edison Project (1994a, 1994b, 1994c), selected language arts frameworks from various states (Mississippi, Texas, Utah, and Virginia), the language arts standards framework from Australia (Australian Education Council, 1994), documents from the New Standards Project (New Standards, 1997), the language arts curriculum documents from the International Baccalaureate (IB) program (1992,1995d) and standards from the Speech Communication Association (1996). New for this edition are supplemental citations from the IB's Primary Years Programme (1996c) and English Language Arts standards from the Council for Basic Education (1998b).

All of the standards documents mentioned thus far discuss the critical role of literature in developing students' expertise in the skills of language arts. To obtain a comprehensive view of the various perspectives regarding the literature with which students should be familiar, a number of sources were consulted. These included: a list of recommended readings from the New England Association of Teachers of English (Stotsky, Anderson, and Beierl, 1989); recommended readings from the California State Department of Education (California State Department of Education, 1989); lists of "best books" by Gillespie (1991a, 1991b); recommended literature by Ravitch and Finn (1987), reading lists from the New Standards Project (1997), lists of recommended literature by the International Baccalaureate Organisation (May,1996a, 1996b), E.D. Hirsch (Hirsch, 1987, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d, 1993e, 1993f), and the Edison Project (1994a, 1994b, 1994c).

In addition to documents that have a specific focus on the language arts, the document Expectations of Excellence: Curriculum Standards for Social Studies (NCSS, 1994) has explicit and implicit standards that deal with reading, writing, and research in enough detail to be useful to this effort.

The domain of media literacy, which addresses student skills in viewing as well as their understanding of media, especially visual media, is relatively new to K-12 education. Only recently has material become available that identifies knowledge and skill appropriate to grade levels in this area. Curriculum documents from the states of Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin were useful in this regard, as well as material available from the Australian Education Council and the Ontario Ministry of Education, and documents from the New Standards Project (New Standards, 1997). While these documents were valuable, they were relatively sparse as compared to the resources we found necessary for the identification of standards in other areas of the language arts, such as reading and writing. Thus, in order to supplement the curriculum documents, especially for the sake of clarifying examples, a number of other documents were consulted. These works include guides from the British Film Institute (Bazalgette, 1989) and the National Communication Association (1998). Also consulted were published materials from recognized experts in the field of media literacy: Considine and Haley (1992), Hobbes (1997), and Masterman (1985). In order to insure that we had covered the significant concepts of this area, a number of other documents were consulted but not used except to confirm our selection of content. These works include material from Jhally, Kline, and Leiss (1990), the New Mexico Literacy Project (1998), the Scarborough Board of Education (Online), Thoman (1999), and Tyner (1998).

Finally, McREL has published a study entitled A Distillation of Subject-Matter Content For the Subject-Areas of Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science (Kendall, Snyder, Schintgen, Wahlquist, & Marzano, 1999). Researchers at McREL reviewed a selected set of highly rated state standards within each subject area, examining them for common content. The McREL analysis resulted in the identification of the significant subject-area content that consistently appeared within these top rated documents.

Selection of Reference Documents and Identification of Standards
Although the standards developed by NCTE and IRA are certainly considered the "official" language arts standards, neither this document nor its related works were amenable to the level of specificity and detail necessary to this study. Given the lack of appropriateness of the NCTE/IRA documents for this effort, different reference documents were identified for different aspects of the English language arts. Two NAEP documents were identified as reference documents for reading and writing since they contained the most explicit statements of standards. Specifically, the reference document selected for the general area of writing was the Description of Writing Achievement Levels-Setting Process and Proposed Achievement Level Definitions. The reference document selected for the general area of reading was Assessment and Exercise Specifications: NAEP Reading Consensus Project: 1992 NAEP Reading Assessment. Both of these documents contain a level of detail sufficient to provide a strong basis for identifying standards in the areas of writing and reading. The reference document identified for the area of listening and speaking was the standards framework developed by the Australian Education Council, English: A Curriculum Profile for Australian Schools (Australian Education Council, 1994). Although listening and speaking were addressed to some extent within other sources (e.g., the New Standards Project), the Australian Framework was deemed the most comprehensive treatment of this area.

For the area of viewing and media, no single document was considered comprehensive enough to serve as a reference document. Instead, descriptions of knowledge and skill in this area were developed from an analysis of the set of documents identified above. While journal articles did not identify content at grade specific levels, they were nonetheless useful for the clarification of ideas expressed in the benchmarks, primarily by the use of examples.

No single source was used as the reference document for the literary works found in the appendix for the language arts standards. The literature cited in the various sources mentioned previously was organized into fairly traditional categories (e.g., nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk tales, fiction, Greek and Roman mythology).

Any benchmark that addresses language arts content that was also identified as important in the McREL study of top standards documents has been so identified by an asterisk at the end of the citation log, which appears just above and to the right of the benchmark.