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What ELA material does Khan Academy have?

Updated

 

Khan Academy's ELA courses were completed by a team of content experts with extensive experience both in the classroom and as curriculum developers. 

Inside our middle school and high school reading & vocab courses, you'll find:

  • Mastery-enabled practice exercises designed to improve reading skills
  • Engaging new texts organized in knowledge-building units to increase students’ understanding of literature, social studies, science, and culture
  • Instruction in high-frequency, high-utility vocabulary words that students will see across the curriculum
  • Entertaining videos and easy-to-understand articles that explain and model critical reading skills
  • Integrated skills exercises that help students prepare for state tests, the SAT, and other assessments

Our reading & vocab courses for grades 2–5 include:

  • High-interest texts organized in knowledge-building topical units
  • Engaging videos to help build critical reading skills
  • Practice exercises that cover both applied vocabulary and comprehension skills

Engaging topics

We organize content into topical units to better support comprehension. Students learn to make inferences, identify main ideas, and evaluate arguments as they explore high-interest topics like ocean science, ethics, and communication. This approach is closely aligned with the intent of many state standards sets, which emphasize the importance of building content knowledge and vocabulary in the context of engaging themed texts. 

Many ways to learn
Our ELA courses include skill-building videos and articles so that students and teachers can choose the resources that best support learning. We also offer two types of practice activity. Short, targeted exercises help students focus on specific skills and close learning gaps. Integrated reading practice allows learners to apply a range of skills to longer texts. These “long passage” exercises mirror authentic, real-world reading experiences and build both reading stamina and content knowledge.

Standards alignment

The content is aligned to, and tagged with, Common Core State Standards for Reading Informational Text (RI), Reading Literature (RL), and Vocabulary Acquisition and Use (Language Anchor Standards 4–6). And because our mastery-enabled exercises are organized by skill, you can find content aligned with standards in all 50 states.  

The passages we use in our practice exercises are also designed to fall within Common Core-aligned text complexity ranges for each grade level. Research shows that students are more interested and motivated when they can engage with thought-provoking, on-level content. 

Assignable 

Teachers, you can assign mastery-enabled reading and vocabulary content to your learners and keep track of their progress—we’ve included some links to relevant how-to guides in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section below. 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is ELA?

ELA stands for English Language Arts. In the US, this typically includes reading, writing, language (usage, vocabulary, grammar, spelling), and speaking and listening. 

How can teachers assign content and monitor learners' progress?

Our ELA courses are mastery-enabled. Course mastery is a powerful, low-lift classroom tool that helps determine the grade-level skills and standards students already know and pinpoints the areas in which they could use additional support. Students can move through a year’s worth of content at their own pace. Teachers can also assign key skills for students to work on right now.

You can learn more about Course mastery here. Here's our guide to creating assignments, and here's the guide to our different assignment reports. 

I’m a teacher outside the U.S.—how do I assign the ELA content to my class?

Take a look at the walkthrough here :)

Will you be adding other areas of ELA as well as reading & vocabulary?

Reading and vocabulary are likely to be our main areas of focus for the foreseeable future. We also have a popular stand-alone grammar course here: https://www.khanacademy.org/ela/grammar

Khan Academy is also excited to announce our newest tool in our pilot of AI: Khanmigo Writing Coach. Designed by teachers and writing instructors, Writing Coach emphasizes the writing process as much as the writing product. Instead of just generating AI feedback or automatically grading essays, Writing Coach supports students during each stage of the writing process without doing any of the writing for them. You can learn more about Writing Coach here. 

What kinds of texts do you use in your ELA courses? 

Many of our texts are written in-house by our team of content experts. Our reading courses consist of topic-based units that help learners grow their content and vocabulary knowledge as they build reading confidence, stamina, and skills. In many cases, writing or commissioning original, engaging texts is a great way to facilitate this kind of learning. 

In addition, we include excerpts from high-interest contemporary novels and works of nonfiction, historical documents, frequently taught classics and poems, and public domain texts like myths and epics. We include texts from a range of genres and time periods to give students the tools they need to be successful readers across domains.

I have a great suggestion for future improvements to the ELA learning experience on Khan Academy! Where should I share it?

Awesome! We would love to hear your ideas. Please provide your feedback on this survey.     

Happy learning!