Language

In this unit you will grow as a listener, speaker and word expert in your last year before high school. First you will ask open-ended questions, reflect both ideas and feelings, and evaluate your own listening skills. You will listen for a speaker's claim and judge whether their evidence is relevant, notice how voice, music and visuals shape a message, and seek clarification. You will analyze purpose, audience and context, use ethos, logos and pathos, and adapt while you speak. You will evaluate and compare how speakers use expression, gestures and body language, including how these can vary across cultures, and speak like an expert with domain-specific vocabulary and cohesive, coherent sentences.

Then you will read and spell complex words using Grade 8 prefixes (a-/an-, ab-, ambi-/amphi-, dia-, epi-, infra-, meta-, para-, peri-), word families that shift in stress, sound and spelling (photograph, photography, photographic), and Grade 8 Greek and Latin roots (cred, ver, fer, mort, pon/pos, gress/grad, flect/flex, junct, migr, flu/flux, lingu, psych, corp, fin). You will learn high school academic words like synthesize and corroborate, words that change meaning across subjects, and words that go together; choose the right dictionary sense and notice loaded words and euphemisms; gear-shift your pace through complex texts; and read aloud with purposeful intonation and expression.

Remember from Grade 7: you paraphrased and probed in discussions, took Cornell notes, used PREP, analyzed paralanguage and video calls, learned many prefixes, suffixes and roots, used context clues, and read complex texts at the right rate. Grade 8 builds on all of it. Grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and handwriting and keyboarding are in the companion unit Foundations of Writing. Every lesson has a hands-on activity, lots of practice and a short quiz.

Curriculum expectations covered: A1.1, A1.2, A3.1, A3.2, B1.1, B1.2, B1.3, B1.4, B1.5, B2.1, B2.2, B2.3 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023, Grade 8). Strand A (A1.1 and A1.2 transferable skills and metacognition; A3.1 and A3.2 applications and connections) is woven in.

In this unit you will refine how you build sentences, how you use grammar and how you punctuate, so your writing says exactly what you mean. Grade 8 is about precision: choosing the connector that names the true relationship between ideas, putting your main idea where readers will notice it, and using punctuation that changes meaning on purpose.

You will build complex sentences that connect ideas precisely, vary your sentences for emphasis, cut wordiness, and link sentences and paragraphs with cohesive ties. You will use all twelve verb tenses, conditional sentences and the subjunctive (If I were...), make verbs and pronouns agree in tricky sentences, and choose pronoun case (who or whom, I or me) and precise usage (fewer/less, lie/lay). Finally, you will refine commas for essential and non-essential information, the fine points of apostrophes, hyphens and capital letters, and research punctuation for titles, quotations and parentheses.

Remember from Grade 7: you sorted adjective, adverb and noun clauses, combined phrases and clauses, fixed misplaced and dangling modifiers, learned indirect objects, predicate nouns and adjectives, participles and adverbial phrases, and used semicolons, conjunctive adverbs, colons before quotations, ellipses and dashes. Grade 8 builds on all of it and gets you ready for high school English. This unit goes with Foundations of Reading. Every lesson has a hands-on activity, lots of practice and a short quiz.

Curriculum expectations covered: B3.1 (syntax and sentence structure), B3.2 (grammar), B3.3 (capitalization and punctuation), with Strand A (A3.1, applying language skills across subjects) woven in (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023, Grade 8).

In this unit you will read, listen and view like a Grade 8 critic, getting ready for high school English. You will compare genres such as historical fiction, memoir, magical realism and speeches, and two cultural text forms, the Pashto landay and the Japanese renga. You will analyze the problem-solution pattern in a letter to the editor, evaluate glossaries and infographics, and evaluate images, graphs and visual design.

You will practise strategies for complex texts: using cohesive ties, sentence structure and prior knowledge from History and Science, fix-up strategies, predictions you confirm or refute, and connections that compare and contrast. You will make local and global inferences, analyze irony, satire and allusion, style, and limited, omniscient and unreliable narrators.

You will think critically about perspectives and bias in texts and in your online feed, how texts address diversity, inclusion and accessibility, and cultural elements such as norms, social hierarchy and taboos. You will learn from First Nations, Métis and Inuit creators through Indigenous Storywork and compare how history shaped their work. Finally, you will synthesize sources into well-supported conclusions and reflect on your own strategies.

Every lesson has short texts written for this site, a hands-on activity, practice questions and a quiz.

Curriculum expectations covered: A1.1, A1.2, A2.1, A2.2, A2.3, A2.4, A2.5, A2.6, A2.7, A3.1, A3.2, A3.3, C1.1, C1.2, C1.3, C1.4, C1.5, C1.6, C1.7, C2.1, C2.2, C2.3, C2.4, C2.5, C2.6, C2.7, C3.1, C3.2, C3.3, C3.4, C3.5, C3.6, C3.7, C3.8 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023, Grade 8).

In this unit you'll write for real purposes and real audiences, the way you'll be expected to in high school. You'll plan texts on challenging topics, including topics about diversity, equity and inclusion and topics from other subjects, and compare alternative forms before choosing one.

You'll research like a professional: checking the currency, credibility, bias and accuracy of information, verifying sources with the SIFT moves, noticing how curated content shapes what you see, synthesizing sources and citing everything in MLA style, and using others' work legally and ethically. You'll organize content with the right tools and evaluate which tools help you most.

Then you'll draft the kinds of texts the Grade 8 curriculum names: narrative (shaping time and theme), persuasive (speeches and op-eds that call for action), expository (analytical essays), informational (news articles that transform data into graphs) and media texts (a multimodal campaign built with a design process). You'll examine voice, point of view and audience response, revise and edit with advanced word-processing tools and fluent cursive, and publish, present and reflect on the whole creative process.

Remember from Grade 7: you justified your form choices, synthesized and evaluated sources, wrote narratives with suspense, arguments with counterclaims, research reports and PSAs, and revised with feedback. Grade 8 adds currency and curated content, formal citation, structure and subtext in stories, the motivated sequence, analytical essays, news writing and data, multi-platform campaigns, implicit points of view and stage-by-stage reflection. Every lesson has model texts written for this site, worked examples, a hands-on activity, plenty of practice with answers and a short quiz.

Curriculum expectations covered: D1.1, D1.2, D1.3, D1.4, D1.5, D2.1, D2.2, D2.3, D2.4, D2.5, D2.6, D3.1, D3.2, D3.3, with connections to Strand A (A1.1, A1.2, A2.1, A2.2, A2.3, A2.4, A2.5, A2.6, A2.7, A3.1, A3.2) (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: Language, 2023, Grade 8).