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Alabama Standards

Alabama 12th Grade ELA Standards

All 37 Alabama English language arts standards for 12th grade, each explained in plain English. The official wording is in Alabama State Department of Education's document, linked at the end of this page.

37 standards

Recurring Standards for Grades 9-12

7 standards
12.R1
Use print and nonprint documents, like a scholarship form or a workplace training manual, to learn new information and respond to adult and workplace demands.
12.R2
Read varied literature, like a Shakespeare play or a British novel, for its literal sense and its figurative layers, matching the reading to the genre and purpose.
12.R3
Practice active listening in formal and informal exchanges, like a mock interview or a panel discussion, following the norms the group agreed on in advance.
12.R4
Use digital and electronic tools with care and integrity, like keeping a professional online presence and respecting copyright in projects.
12.R5
Use planning, revising, editing with peers, and rewriting to shape a piece, like a senior research paper, into focused, organized writing for a set purpose and audience.
12.R6
Use standard grammar, mechanics, and usage, like correct pronoun case in a cover letter, to communicate effectively with a specific audience.
12.R7
Infer the meaning of unfamiliar words you hear or read from context clues, like the clues around an archaic word in a Shakespeare play.

Critical Literacy

14 standards
12.1
Read, analyze, and judge complex British literary and historical texts from particular viewpoints, including a Shakespeare play and its impact on English and later works.
12.2
Pull together data from at least two graphic texts, like an infographic and a budget table, to draw conclusions, defend a claim, or decide on a course of action.
12.3
Judge how effectively a writer openly displays their cultural viewpoint to shape style and meaning, like Jonathan Swift's Irish perspective in his satire.
12.4
Evaluate how well a writer uses point of view, characters, figurative language, and literary elements to build meaning, like the narrator's voice in Jane Eyre.
12.5
Judge how a text's structure and organization reveal the author's purpose, including when the meaning is ironic or satirical, like A Modest Proposal.
12.6
Weigh a text's stated and implied meanings to infer its theme and pin down the author's purpose, like the unstated social critique in Pride and Prejudice.
12.7
Compare or contrast how viewpoints differ across fiction, nonfiction, digital, and multimodal texts from many periods and cultures, looking past the British literature focus.
12.8
Analyze and judge readings from science, social studies, and other subjects and explain how each field handles its terms and structures content, like an economics report.
12.9
Complete a specific task using directions in a technical document, like assembling equipment from a manual.
12.10
Judge a speaker's or several sources' purpose, credibility, and impact by listening for tone, structure, content, and cues, and spot faulty logic or distorted evidence.
12.11
Draft, edit, and revise short and long pieces in a fitting style, like expositions built on cited data and arguments with deliberate rhetorical choices, adding story techniques.
12.12
Work respectfully in diverse writing groups, willing to compromise to reach a shared goal, taking on part of the work, and weighing each member's contributions.
12.13
Judge the reliability and accuracy of sources across media and formats, then draw on several strong ones to build an idea or advance a position.
12.14
Engage fully in pair, small-group, and whole-class discussions of topics and texts, sharing your own ideas and respectfully adding to and questioning what others say.

Digital Literacy

4 standards
12.15
Break down a digital text, like a company's social media campaign, and evaluate how effectively it fits its subject, occasion, audience, purpose, tone, and credibility.
12.16
Examine the elements of audio messages from digital sources, like a news podcast, and rate their effectiveness in subject, occasion, audience, purpose, tone, and credibility.
12.17
Build or strengthen individual or team multimodal projects with visuals, audio, and animation, like a short documentary, so purpose and tone suit the audience and occasion.
12.18
Build a spoken presentation from each teammate's contributions and deliver it together, like a group talk on a British poet, suiting purpose and tone to audience and occasion.

Language Literacy

5 standards
12.19
Interpret how writers use grammar and rhetorical style to build meaning in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, like Churchill's wartime speeches or a workplace policy.
12.20
Judge the level of formality in different audio sources, like a court hearing or a comedy podcast, to understand, interpret, and respond in a fitting way.
12.21
Study how a speaker uses rhetoric, style, and organization to determine viewpoint, purpose, and effectiveness, like a speech by a British prime minister.
12.22
Use standard English grammar, mechanics, and usage with formality suited to the audience, writing in a style that is sophisticated, complex, and consistent.
12.23
Deliver a purposeful speech in polished formal English to a professional audience, like college admissions staff or local employers.

Research Literacy

7 standards
12.24
Rate the credibility of a source, like a think-tank report, by authority, relevance, accuracy, and purpose, and decide if its facts help a research question, solution, or stance.
12.25
Find and gather credible, relevant, useful information with varied search tools and strategies, like academic databases and interlibrary loan.
12.26
Seek out audio sources, like a city council recording, to solve problems, answer questions, or back positions, listening actively to weigh usefulness, relevance, and credibility.
12.27
Pull research results together after collecting them responsibly, then write clear, unified products with language polished for the audience and purpose, like a policy brief.
12.28
Blend ethically found material from three or more source types, one visual or numeric, into a research project through quotes, summaries, and paraphrases cited in one style.
12.29
Draw on varied academic and nonacademic sources to write clear, unified work that argues a position, answers a research question, or lays out a solution.
12.30
Synthesize responsibly gathered research into a polished product and deliver it orally with strong command of language, like a senior project defense before a panel.

The official Alabama documents

The plain-English lines on this page are EMStudio's own explanations of Alabama's standards, not the official wording, which Alabama State Department of Education publishes in the documents above. Codes and strand names identify each standard.