LANGUAGE! instruction is highly motivational, interactive and multi-sensory. Explicit instruction guides the teachers and students through the six literacy strands in every lesson, always maintaining focus on fluency and comprehension.

	Phonemic Awareness and Phonics
	Word Recognition and Spelling
	Vocabulary and Morphology
	Grammar and Usage
	Reading Comprehension and Listening
	Writing and Speaking

The instructional model uses the "I do, we do, you do" approach—with teacher modeling, guided practice, and independent practice. Some of the instructional features include:

	Simple to complex content and skill development
	Repetition of key content within and across lesson
	Practice on critical skills for automaticity, reinforcement, and application

LANGUAGE! includes the three types of assessment.

Placement Tests: Placement Assessment — Results of the three placement tests guide teachers regarding placement of students in the curriculum. The entry point is based on their current functioning rather than grade level designation. These tests also provide teachers with a baseline measure of students' skills against which to track students' growth throughout the curriculum.

Ongoing/Formative Assessment — Content Mastery and fluency tasks in each unit assess students' mastery of the content, concepts, and skills taught in the curriculum. This performance information informs pacing and differentiation.

Summative Assessment: Summative Tests and Progress Indicators — Given at the end of each book, Summative Tests provide each student's overall mastery of curriculum content. Progress Indicators monitor growth in critical literacy skills. These tests are similar to the placement tests and are designed to track overall student progress.

LANGUAGE! explicitly guides teachers in using data to inform instruction. Based on the data from the ongoing assessment, teachers are provided with "If/Then Boxes"; essentially, these boxes direct teachers to specific intervention supports based on student mastery of content (for example, "If a student scores below 80%, then they would benefit from completing the Sortegories exercise for the unit").

	Sortegories: Computer-based, interactive practice activities that focus on vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension
	Words for Teachers: Generates customized practice sheets for addition support
	eReader: Text-to-speech software to reinforce literature
	Reteaching and Reinforcement activities

The reading selections in LANGUAGE! are engaging, age-appropriate, skill-level appropriate, and they relate directly to all literacy strands being concurrently taught in the curriculum. The topics of the text selections are interesting and current—covering topics that are of interest to students, the curriculum includes reading selections with content such as, athletics, technology, art, and pop culture. Additionally, the readability levels range from PreK to grade 10. The further a student moves in the curriculum, the more the readability value increases.

	Decodable/Independent Text: 100% decodable to increase fluency and confidence
	Instructional Text: More challenging than the decodable text, this level of text models different text structures, provides a context for vocabulary development, and provides a context for response to literature
	Challenge Text: The most difficult level of text, this text exposes students to various genres of literature, broadens vocabulary, and provides opportunities for development of higher-level thinking

The curriculum includes text selections in multiple genres (plays, poems, articles, letters, fiction, nonfiction, biography, and so forth).

Additionally, the selections begin with a strong emphasis in nonfiction and move to a heavier emphasis in fiction. In LANGUAGE!, students are exposed to key literature that is grade-level appropriate such as selections from House on Mango Street, Don Quixote, and The Tell-Tale Heart, along with poetry by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost.

The content of several of the text selections relates to the content areas with many informational texts that are centered on science, geography, history, mathematics, and art.

	within the context of text using context clues.
	through examining the multiple meanings of words, definitions, and word relationships.
	Through morphology—students are taught how to examine word parts and to identify word.

Students are taught multiple strategies for comprehending text—predicting, questioning, connecting, making inferences, note taking, and so forth. These strategies can be generalized across the content areas and they increase students' abilities to think critically and analyze a text for meaning.

LANGUAGE! includes the Words for Teachers CD-ROM. This instructional support tool gives teachers access to more than 33,000 decodable words in the curriculum. The words can be selected, sorted, and printed as activity worksheets, allowing teachers to create practice opportunities and customize instruction to focus on content-area words.