The language arts course content guides presented in this manual cover English, oral communications, and journalism in grades 9-12 and provide a framework from which a curriculum can be built. Within each subject area and at each grade level, skills are identified at three instructional levels: basic, developmental, and extension. The basic skills are skills which all students should master; developmental skills, going beyond the basic level, should be introduced and taught, but not mastered by all students; extension skills, for learners who have mastered the required basic and recommended developmental skills, stress the higher order thinking, processing, and problem solving skills. Subject areas for English consist of capitalization, punctuation, writing numbers (grade 9), syllabication (grade 9), usage, elements of the sentence, semantics, spelling, reference skills, literature, and composition. For the oral communications curriculum, subject areas include universal dimensions of all oral communications efforts, intrapersonal communication, interpersonal communication, listening and critical thinking, nonverbal communication, group discussion, public speaking, parliamentary procedure, oral interpretation, and debate. Journalism subject areas include an introduction to journalism, history of journalism, terminology, news writing, feature writing, editorials, publication production, ethics, advertising, and careers in journalism. (MM)