The Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS) was developed by the Texas Educational Agency (TEA), in response to Texas House Bill 72 (1984), which mandated a new basic skills assessment program for mathematics, reading, and writing at grades 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. The test given to students in Grade 11 is an exit-level examination, and Texas students must pass this test prior to receiving their high school diploma. This document is one in a series of Instructional Strategies Guides designed to familiarize Texas educators with the types of strategies employed in assessing learner mastery of TEAMS objectives and to provide suggested instructional activities that can be used to promote mastery of those objectives. This guide focuses on the reading and writing objectives measured by the English language arts section of the TEAMS Exit Level Test. It provides a detailed description of the test items used to measure each objective. The ten reading objectives are subsumed in six skill areas: (1) main idea; (2) word meaning (contextual analysis, structural analysis); (3) detail (specifics, sequence); (4) inference (conclusions, fact and opinion); (5) reference usage (selecting reference sources, using reference sources); and (6) analysis of literature. The eight writing objectives are subsumed in five skill areas: (1) mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, and spelling); (2) English usage; (3) sentence formation (completion and combination); (4) proofreading; and (5) organization. The following information is provided for each objective: (1) a description of the objective; (2) a sample item; (3) test questions; (4) answer choices; (5) answer analysis for the sample item; (6) instructional emphases; and (7) possible instructional activities. (JAZ)