Academic English IV
Curriculum Guide

Course Description

Students read a diverse and compelling variety of literary works. A particular focus of study will be on works concerned with voice, community, and associated themes. Critical analysis and other papers, including fictional pieces and essays, are regularly assigned in connection with readings. Each student completes a major research project as well as several oral presentations. Students confer about their writing outside of class in the Writing Center.

Course Overview

Academic English IV is a "capstone" course, the culmination of schooling in the subject field most clearly associated with literacy: English language arts. Literacy involves the ability to understand and to produce a wide variety of texts that use the English language including work in the traditional literary forms, in the practical and persuasive forms, and in the modern media. Whether students go on to higher education or enter the work force after graduation, their success will depend to a great extent on their ability to under stand and use the English language. That is why this course makes language itself and its use in various forms, genres, and media the center of attention.

Language can be as personal as the pronouns "I" and "you" or as impersonal as a tax form. To live as mature human beings and functioning members of society, we need to be able to communicate with others. In some cultures the ability to speak and listen carries the whole burden of communication. But our culture is organized by the most complex system of textuality the world has ever known. We need speaking and listening skills to be sure, and we need to be literate in the traditional sense: able to read and write. But we also need to be "literate" across a various and complex network of different kinds of writing and various communications media.

It is this complexity that has led us to the use of the word "text" in designing the English IV course. Poems, plays, stories, letters, essays, interviews, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television shows, and yes, even tax forms, are all different kinds of texts. What the course aims at then is to increase the textual power of the students who take it: to help them learn how to read in the fullest sense of that word. Reading, in this sense of the word, means being able to place or situate a text, to understand it from the inside, sympa thetically, and to step away from it and see it from the outside, critically. It means being able to see a text for what it is and to ask, also, how it connects or fails to connect to the life and times of the reader.

This, in Robert Schon's words, is textual power, but textual power does not stop there: it also in cludes the ability to respond, to talk back, to write back, to analyze, to extend, to take one's own textual position in relation to Shakespeare or to any kind of text. Shakespeare wants audiences whose love of language and ability to respond to it match his own textual power. A tax form (like most other bureaucratic forms) wants a person who can follow directions. Every text offers its audience a certain role to play. Textual power involves the ability to play many roles and to know that one is playing them as well as the ability to generate new texts, to make something that did not exist before somebody made it. That all that is what this course is about. It is our belief that a student leaving high school should do so with a well -developed sense of textual power.

The course is also about "voices" and "cultures." Modern American culture is a product of its history a history in which many voices have spoken and continue to be heard: voices from our past, voices from abroad, individual voices, institutional voices, the loud voice of the media and the still, small voice of indi vidual conscience. This course involves listening to those voices, understanding how a single culture can be made out of many voices, and finding the voices one needs to express oneself and be heard in the midst of this hubbub. This notion of "voice," of course, is a metaphor drawn from speech and this course will not neglect the skills of speaking and listening, but it will also stress the ability to understand and use the written word, and it will offer experiences with the languages of the modern media.

Throughout the course, students are involved in tasks that demand critical analysis. While response to reading and viewing in this course is important, assignments and activities ask students to demonstrate their ability to analyze their experiences with texts. Personal analysis is important, but at the end of English IV, students will need to have effectively used objective means to consider the texts they encounter. Thus, the course asks that, as a result of their thinking and research, students write competent analytical prose. This means that they apply what they have learned in previous courses; that they study and use models and rubrics that support effective writing and thinking; that they not only collect data, but also use their research effectively; that they develop and articulate reasoned judgments, draw viable comparisons, and make clear connections; that they demonstrate the ability to be precise and clear in their thinking about and use of language.

Finally, the "English Language Arts Outcomes at Mt. Ararat High School" as central to the work of teachers as course activities and assignments are designed and revised. Throughout the course, students are expected to show the results of their accumulated learning by demonstrating their proficiency as readers of literature, and as writers, speakers, listeners, viewers, consumers, and users of language.

Course Components

Here is the course in more detail so that you can see how these ideas will work in action.

The common features of the course as it is taught by different teachers is not a particular set of works to be

"covered," but a set of certain kinds of works to be studied and responded to in certain ways. That is, the emphasis is upon students' ability to situate and comprehend a range of texts in different genres and media, from different times and places, and to produce new texts of their own in response to what they have read and considered. In order to make the intent of the course concrete, it will be described here in terms of specific works and projects, but we also offer in connection with each unit a set of criteria that enables substitutions to suit particular class conditions.

In any case, all the texts considered in the course, from the past and the present, from far away and from close to home, should be studied in such a way as to connect them to the issues and concerns of this country and its people at the present time. For example, a play by Shakespeare chosen for this course should be studied both as a voice from another culture, another time, and because it addresses human concerns that are still important and alive for us. That will become clearer as we summarize the units that constitute Academic English IV.

Course Unit Summaries

Note: course units are not necessarily taught in this order by all teachers.

Unit 1: Many Selves, Many Voices

At the center of this unit is the student's relation to language. Students are asked to consider their own position as cultured speakers, with voices shaped by their heritages, their experiences, and their school ing. Each student is asked to investigate how she or he is "situated" as an individual who belongs to certain groups and addresses insiders and outsiders in different voices. Students are asked to consider their present command of language and voices, invited to take pride in what they know, and encouraged to strive to increase their linguistic range and depth. At the same time, they investigate the voices of a range of writers addressing the questions: "Who am I?" and "Who are we?" For this purpose lyric poems and essays provide the most useful examples of linguistic grace and power in the service of personal expression and self-exami nation. The whole purpose of Academic English IV and its relation to other English courses can be found here in Unit 1. Like previous courses, poems and essays are read and studied. However, in this course these texts are presented as examples of textual power for students to emulate. The goal is for students to see themselves as users of language, with voices of their own that are similar to those of the writers they are reading. Confronting the same kinds of questions and concerns as those writers, students can see themselves as active partners in the writing process. In this mode, they should read not only to understand but also to emulate the text they are reading. "What can I learn from this text, this writer about how to express myself?" is a question that energizes the relationship of the student as reader to the text being read. It is that energy that should drive this whole course, and cap the English experience for our students.

Selected readings include: poetry by Stephen Spender, Lucille Clifton, John Keats, Robert Browning, John Milton, Sojourner Truth; stories or excerpts from writings by Amy Tan, Charles Kuralt, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Samuel Pepys, Winston Groom, Satchel Paige, and others.

Unit 2: "Stranger in the Village": Encountering the Other, Being the Other

This unit is about the way culture and language work to include and exclude individuals. Essays and stories about the situation of being an "other" a stranger in a village or about encountering such a stranger, are the core readings for this unit. And, once again, students read (and view) these texts in prepara tion for writing their own narratives about such an encounter. The experiences of James Baldwin in a Swiss village or George Orwell in a Burmese town (or comparable texts) will be read not only as "literature" but also as "writing" as solutions to the same kind of task that the students themselves will be performing. The difference between this kind of reading and traditional reading might be thought of as comparable to the difference between "just watching" a play or a basketball game and watching one in order to learn some moves you might make yourself on stage or on the court. The goal of the unit is to help students avoid feeling like strangers in the village of literature but like members of a literary culture that includes them as well as writers like Baldwin and Orwell.

A pair of visual texts are commonly used in connection with this unit, each one emphasizing the presence of an "other" in the midst of a community. The community seen in the film Local Hero is foreign but not hostile or totally alien. Selected episodes of Patrick McGoohan's the Prisoner however, deal with a different community, one which exercises a particular kind of power ("we know what's good for you and we want to use you") while appearing benevolent by offering "prisoners" a placid and protected life. In "The Village" of the Prisoner, the struggle between the individual and the community is presented in vivid as well as ambiguous, terms.

Works used: selected written texts relate to key pieces by James Baldwin and George Orwell. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is commonly used in connection with this unit. Other authors read may include: Gaston Leroux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Shirley Jackson, Doris Lessing, H.G. Wells, Anne Tyler, John Gardner.

Unit 3: A Medley of Voices: Investigating Cultures and Voices in Classic and Contemporary Texts

In this unit students explore the power of a number of texts representing a medley of voices engaged in a conversation and/or a struggle for space and/or identity within a community. The close study of a novel is part of this unit, a novel chosen not only because it has literary merit, but also because it takes up directly the problem of voice speaking from places separated by cultural gaps, a recurring theme in the course. In this unit, "voice" will be considered specifically as dialect and register, speech patterns that are audible signs of the groups that use them signs of class, signs of race, signs of gender, signs of educational level. We are all sensitive to the ways in which our language marks us, enables or disables us in certain situations. As a country, we do not like to think of ourselves as divided into distinct classes by our speech. We attribute that kind of thing to the British, perhaps because our social classes are not so distinct as theirs. But we are not exactly a melting pot either. Language, with its textual power to enable or disable us, is always at work in the ways we speak and write.

The purpose of this unit is to look at language working in fictional situations in which different varieties of language are represented. In considering the voices within these texts, students will be encouraged to "situate" the different voices. There is no voice without a group and that group's culture behind it. To "situate" in this sense is to "place" a dialect or register, to ask who speaks it, where they come from, and what values that they share are embodied in their speech. The works studied, while recognized through the lens or visual filter of contemporary American culture, will be drawn from distinct cultural contexts. This, once again, requires student attention to voice. In studying a novel, for example, one asks about the voice or voices in which the narrative is told. Who is speaking to us? What kind of voice is that? Does it present itself as reliable, trustworthy? How does it establish its authority? How does that voice compare to the voices of characters as they are represented? Is the narrator a character? Is the narrator the author? When is each voice at its most eloquent pitch? What are its strengths? When does that voice reach limits or barriers? Do characters speak always in one voice or in more than one? How do different characters speak to one another?

The length of a novel sometimes requires prolonged engagement with it by the class. There needs to be time to read it, time to discuss it, time to write responses to it. In this unit, the novel chosen should not be a fantastic work, but one set in a time and place that is accessible by means of other texts. The novel, too, should be seen as a voice speaking from a particular cultural site. Knowing more about the author, more about the background of the represented world, should enable students to read a text more powerfully. The point is not to find the answers to fictional questions in the author's life or in the history of a time and place, but to use such information to ask more interesting questions about that novel. A novel that is about a known spot in the world is also always an interpretation of that spot and that world. It is a text, a voice, speaking about a place as it looks from a certain spot.

In shaping this unit, teachers can expect students to understand that literary works are made by human beings with ideas and feelings, strengths and weaknesses, axes to grind and values to promote. The point of the unit is to help students develop their ability to read a text as coming from some specific source, a human being inhabiting a particular cultural place and to ask how the fictional events and characters represented in that text connect to their own lives, their own hopes and fears, their own values and beliefs. An effective text should help us understand more about some other place or time but it should also bring us to a deeper knowledge of ourselves and our own place and time. One reason for studying "different voices" is to listen for echoes of the voices that will become ours when we assert our own textual powers.

Among literary works used: The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan novel); Rebel Without a Cause (film); Dubliners (James Joyce short stories); Fences (August Wilson play); Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller play); Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton novel).

Unit 4: Voices from the Past: Inheriting and Revisioning Drama

This is a major unit (planned to cover six weeks of the course) in which a dramatic text from the past is the center of an investigation that has two parts or tracks. One of these tracks has to do with the double situation of any work from the past in its own time and in ours. The other has to do with the spoken voice and theatrical production. Neither of these tracks is simple. In a course that is built around the meta phor of voice and the concept of culture, this unit is the centerpiece around which everything else turns. This is the unit in which we feature, as we do in each English course, a play by Shakespeare. To speak his lines with understanding is to enrich one's own ability to use the medium of spoken English and, ultimately, one's ability to listen, read, and write as well.

Students read and experience Hamlet, in which the issues of conflict and alienation strike hard at the reader/viewer. Hamlet himself is a stranger, a prisoner even in a village that is a castle. Because it is a play written four centuries away from our own time, with a history of productions and performances, it offers an opportunity to consider performance as interpretation, performances as "readings" of the play readings that changed over time to suit different audiences in different cultures. The simple question of who should play the role of this brooding Dane is not so simple, given the circumstances of performance. In introducing students to the framework of tragedy, Oedipus Rex is viewed and excerpts of the text are usually studied.

One track of this unit, then, gives attention to "situating" the play in the history of its writing and its productions down to the present time. Another track involves thinking about it as theater, as staging, as vocal interpretation and performance. The idea here is to get students thinking about the play the way a director must think about staging it and the way an actor must think about expressing character, not just through the voice but through the body and its movements as well. This means giving students the opportu nity to put on scenes from the play themselves, to view/hear different performances on video/audio, to discuss and write about the play not simply as a written text but as the basis for many possible realizations. Readers must help to renew literary texts by connecting them to their own times, their own lives. Thinking about the modern performance of a play from another time, another culture makes all these questions of interpretation real and vital and offers the student, once again, the chance to be not the passive recipient of literature but an active participant, the partner of the writer in the realization of a text.

Materials: Video and/or audiotapes of Hamlet performances by Derek Jacobi, Mel Gibson, Richard Burton, Nicol Williamson, and Kenneth Branaugh are among those used.

Unit 5: Visible Voices: Reading Film

One of the most powerful voices in modern culture is that of film. It is an international medium, but unlike the play or the novel, it is one in which his country has played a decisive role from its beginnings a century ago to the present time. Like the drama, film uses spoken language, but films have never been merely recordings of plays. They are a medium to which speech, music, and sound effects all contribute, but the medium is primarily visual. The composer Richard Wagner said that he wanted each of his operas to be a "Gesamtkunstwerk" a total work of art. Film often comes close to achieving that. But to understand film is to realize that it is dominated by its apparatus by the camera and the editing table in particular.

The goal of this unit is to enable students to "read" films with a real grasp of the language of the medium. To achieve this, one film is studied as a sort of laboratory example of how the apparatus works to achieve its effects. Rear Window, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, is one film selected for this purpose, because Hitchcock is a cinema magician whose tricks are so powerful that they reveal themselves easily to an attentive "reader." Studying such a film will be the occasion for students to learn how the apparatus works. Hitchcock, like certain Impressionist painters, makes the viewer very aware of the medium itself, even while using it to represent its objects with great power and eloquence. One project associated with part of the unit might be the student's own "storyboard" or "shot list" of a film or video. That is, students working in small groups, perhaps, will either demonstrate how one might film a scene of their own choosing, or they will use the same technique to analyze a scene from a film, a television commercial or any other appropriate text.

Unit 6: Language Use and Awareness

This segment of the course is not so much a separate "unit" as an ongoing concern. When students read, view, or listen, they should become aware of how particular effects (stylistic, for example) are achieved by linguistic choices. Since imaginative literature, poetry, and plays often highlight such stylistic decisions, fiction and poetry assume a prominent place in the course. A key purpose for featuring literature study is to help students understand rhetorical and linguistic choices, rather than to study literary conventions. Particu lar course activities that are not directly related to literary study ask students to develop their understanding of the roles and uses of language in a practical, observational context. They consider the use of language to persuade and control, to transmit information, to foster social cohesion, as well for artistic expression. In the words of S.I. Hayakawa, "to perceive how language works, what pitfalls it conceals, what its possibilities are, is to comprehend a crucial aspect of the complicated business of living the life of a human being." Students contend with many of the "applications" from S.I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action throughout the course. Close attention is paid to symbols; reports, inferences, judgments; language in context; and the language of social control. A number of core assignments relate literary and language study to each other, e.g. the study of Baldwin and Orwell texts in unit 2.

The intense concentration on language use in this course should help students develop their ability to use grammatical conventions both appropriately and with sophistication as well as to develop stylistic maturity in their prose. Stylistic development is nurtured by emphasizing the following: a balance of gener alization and specific illustrative detail; a wide-ranging vocabulary used appropriately and effectively; a variety of sentence structures, including appropriate use of subordination and coordination; a logical organi zation, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence, such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis; and an effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, establishing and maintaining voice, and achiev ing appropriate emphasis through diction and sentence structure.

Unit 7: The Senior Project

In this culminating assignment, students demonstrate the ability to access information through various modes of research, including interviews. Each student must organize and shape this information into a meaningful paper and an effective speech in which he presents the results of his work to the class. The subject of the project grows out of an area of personal focus each student identifies about half way through the course. The routine for research is generally prescriptive, as students become familiar with Bowdoin College as well as other community resources. In this assignment, the students build on research skills developed through the I-Search process (see the English II curriculum guide). The character, depth, sophisti cation, and dimension of inquiry is more extensive: students must pull together a body of research and highlight it in analytical writing and effective speaking. Finally, their work must conform to appropriate academic conventions.

Grading Standards and Student Evaluation

A major goal of evaluation is to help students become more aware of what they have to do and how they are doing. We wnat them to learn how to assess the quality of their own work. To this end, rubrics and grading guides are used in connection with many assignments.

Student work on core assignments is assessed according to the following categories:

4: Exemplary
3: Accomplished
2: Satisfactory
1: Rudimentary
NE: No Evidence

Teachers discuss grades with students in conference during marking periods. At the end of each marking period, students earn grades of A B C D or F following teacher assessment of that portion of the year's work. When assigned work is not handed in at the appointed time on the due date the student receives a NE or No Evidence in connection with that assignment. If eventually handed in during the marking period, late work may receive up to (but no more than) a 50, at the teacher's discretion. A No Evidence awarded as a result of cutting is not eligible for such restitution.

Core Assignments

Teachers select, revise, and invent particular core assignments in conjunction with the above curriculum units. The following pages include examples of these core assignments and, when applicable, their rubrics. Assignments and additional illustrative material are presented by units.

www.mta75.org/curriculum/english/acad4.html

Academic English IV Curriculum Guide