of the English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects standards is to ensure that students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school. There are five key components to the standards for English and Language Arts: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, Language, and Media and Technology. The essential components and breakdown of each of these key points within the standards are as follows: Reading As students advance through each grade, there is an increased level of complexity to what students are expected to read and there is also a progressive development of reading comprehension so that students can gain more from what they read. Teachers, school districts, and states are expected to decide on the appropriate curriculum, but sample texts are included to help teachers, students, and parents prepare for the year ahead. Molly Walsh of Burlington Free Press notes an appendix (of state standards for reading material) that lists "exemplar texts" from works by noted authors such as Ovid, Voltaire, William Shakespeare, Ivan Turgenev, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, W. B. Yeats, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the more contemporary, including, Amy Tan, Atul Gawande and Julia Alvarez. There is some critical content for all students classic myths and stories from around the world, foundational U.S. documents, seminal works of American literature, and the writings of Shakespeare but the rest is left up to the states and the districts. Standards for Reading Foundational Skills are described for kindergarten to grade five. They include the areas of print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency. Specific teaching suggestions and research are contained in the Appendices, where “phonics” is referred to as “Phoneme-Grapheme Correspondences”. Writing The driving force of the writing standards is logical arguments based on claims, solid reasoning, and relevant evidence. The writing also includes opinion writing even within the K–5 standards. Short, focused research projects, similar to the kind of projects students will face in their careers, as well as long-term, in-depth research is another piece of the writing standards. This is because written analysis and the presentation of significant findings are critical to career and college readiness. The standards also include annotated samples of student writing to help determine performance levels in writing arguments, explanatory texts, and narratives across the grades. Speaking and listening Although reading and writing are the expected components of an English