1.) Apply strategies, including making inferences to determine theme, confirming or refuting predictions, and using specific context clues, to comprehend eighth-grade recreational reading materials.

2.) Evaluate the impact of setting, mood, and characterization on theme in specific literary selections.

3.) Distinguish among the subcategories of poetry, such as ballads, lyric poems, epics, haiku, and limericks, based on their characteristics.

4.) Apply strategies appropriate to type of reading material, including making inferences to determine bias or theme and using specific context clues, to comprehend eighth-grade informational and functional reading materials.

5.) Explain distinguishing characteristics of odes, ballads, epic poetry, historical documents, essays, letters to the editor, and editorials.

6.) Analyze works of literature for character motivation, mood, tone, theme, similarities across texts, and literary devices.

7.) Compose a business letter, including heading, inside address, salutation, body, closing, and signature.

8.) Write in narrative, expository, and persuasive modes with attention to descriptive elements.

9.) Apply mechanics in writing, including punctuating titles using quotation marks, underlining, or italics and using semicolons, conjunctive adverbs, and commas to join two independent clauses or to correct run-on sentences.

10.) Use prepositional phrases and compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences to vary sentence structure.

11.) Write sentence patterns common to English construction.

12.) Identify the correct use of degrees of comparison, adjectives and adverb forms, subject-verb agreement with collective nouns when verb forms depend on the rest of the sentence and with compound subjects, including those joined by or with the second element as singular or plural.

13.) Combine all aspects of the research process to compose a report.

14.) Identify characteristics of spoken formal and informal language.