The components of the English Language Arts curriculum are reading, writing, speaking, listening, thinking, and viewing. A major aim of the English Language Arts Department is to help students become independent learners as well as critical, creative, and inventive thinkers. The department believes that the English Language Arts classroom is an interpretive community in which students are given the opportunity to become active learners who accept both the challenge and the responsibility for making meaning during the thinking-reading-writing interaction.