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English III:
Advanced Placement English
Language and Composition
Curriculum Guide

Course Description

Prerequisite: English II and submission of two pieces of writing for review (one on-demand, one finished).

Students in this college-level course will have previously demonstrated strong writing and analytical skills. Students read and carefully analyze a broad and challenging range of prose selections, and develop their awareness of how language works. Through close reading and frequent writing, students develop their ability to work with language and text with a greater awareness of purpose and strategy, while strengthening their own composing abilities. Students are required to confer about their writing in the Writing Center as well as in class. While the reading assignments feature expository, analytical, and argumentative essays from a variety of authors and historical contexts, students examine and respond to American writing including literature and essays by authors such as Hawthorne, Twain, Dillard, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Didion, Baldwin, Salinger, McCarthy, Murray, Capote, Gilman, and McPhee. A Shakespeare play is also studied (usually Macbeth). Summer reading and writing is required. Students prepare for the Advanced Placement Examination in English: Language and Composition to earn possible college-level credit.

Course Overview

Probably the most common college course in English is "freshman" or introductory composition. Students are taught that writing is a craft and their goals are usually to develop skills in expository writing. In conjunction with their writing, students in an introductory college course read various kinds of argumenta tive and expository prose. AP English Language and Composition is a version of such an introductory college course, one appropriately shaped for precollege age students.

In AP English Language and Composition, student reading and writing experiences focus on nonfic tion prose. Teachers ask that students become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disci plines, and rhetorical contexts. Writing tasks give students the practice necessary to make them aware, flexible writers who can compose in different modes and or different purposes. Frequent writing conferences on major papers are designed to support their efforts to improve their writing. In developing sophisticated reading and writing skills, students explore and describe how language works. They learn to observe and analyze the words, patterns, and structures that create subtle effects of language. They learn to describe language, demonstrating working knowledge of parts of speech, structural patterns, awareness of connota tion and shades of meaning in context. To do this, the student must develop a vocabulary for what George Gadda of University of California (Berkeley) calls "the abstractions of human experience, the words one needs in order to be precise about an author's 'tone,' attitude,' 'assumption,' or 'point of view.'" Gadda describes the broad aims of the course as relating to student reading and writing in three areas related to the study of discourse: 1) The Purpose and Modes of Discourse; 2) The Development of Discourse; 3) The Language of Discourse. His ideas represent the core aims of our AP Language and Composition course. They are expressed here in terms of ideal student learning results. A student who can do all this should be able to score least a 3 on the AP English Language and Composition examination.

Purpose and Modes of Discourse

as writers, students will:

• employ a variety of rhetorical structures appropriate for various purposes and audiences;

• subordinate parts to an effective whole and create appropriate transitions between them;

• adopt the conventions of the appropriate discipline or discourse community when writing for a particular audience.

as readers, students will:

• identify the purpose and modes of discourse and explain their relationship to rhetorical structure;

• explain how the parts of discourse are related to each other and to the whole;

• recognize the conventions of different genres and historical periods, and identify the assumptions authors have made about their audiences.

The Development of Discourse

as writers students will:

• gather information and ideas, discover patterns, and develop their sense of purpose;

• select and arrange information and ideas effectively for given purposes and modes of discourse;

• communicate ideas and experiences to an intellectually sophisticated audience.

as readers students will:

• recognize main ideas and purposes and explain inferences about an author's intentions;

• evaluate the connections between ideas at different levels of generality, including the adequacy of evidence;

• evaluate the value and validity of the writer's message in relation to its historical, social, or cultural context.

The Language of Discourse

as writers students will:

• shape language in a variety of rhetorical patterns so that sentence structure, diction, and figures of speech serve purpose, audience, and strategy;

• explain how one's choices of language produce intended effects.

as readers students will:

• discern and describe in an appropriate vocabulary how the arrangement of language creates a voice;

• identify major devices that control tone and structure; show how they serve rhetorical purposes.

Both the reading and the writing tasks should help students gain textual power, making them more alert to an author's purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone. By the late spring of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in effective writing and critical reading. The writing skills that students learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of prose texts can serve them in their own writing as they grow increasingly aware of these skills and their pertinent uses. During the course, a wide variety of prose texts and writing tasks are the subject of study. In connection with their study of language, they will read about the evolution and development of English prose style since the Middle Ages and consider the continuing evolu tion of the English language.

As this is an AP (college-level) course, performance expectations are high, and the workload is challenging. Students are expected to complete a minimum of five hours of course work a week outside of class. Often, work involves long-term writing and reading assignments. Effective time management is important.

Course Components

Summer Work

The course opens with discussion and work with the summer assignment. The summer reading features several non-fiction prose selections rather than the work of fiction that students come to expect from English teachers. (Current summer reading is Inventing the Truth , edited by William Zinsser and including essays by Annie Dillard, Russell Baker, Toni Morrison, and others.) While this can seem odd to them, the initial work invites a fresh analytical approach, one which asks them to move beyond immediate response to close reading and study of language. Students are asked to represent their initial learnings in written and oral presentations.

Reading Closely with Critical Awareness of Language

Students in Advanced Placement English read a significant amount of non-fiction prose. Selections are drawn from different sources, such as magazines, specialty journals, newspapers as well as from the anchor text, The Riverside Reader. The focus of study is upon several key questions: what is the purpose of the piece? who is the audience for the piece? what are the author's strategies? Guidelines for Reading an Essay serves as a touchstone for student thinking and writing about these readings during the year. A primary goal is to get students thinking about what they're reading in a more reflective, disciplined, logical, and alert way. The class considers many texts during this course from a variety of time periods and cultures.

At the earliest possible time, students are introduced to close, critical reading of expository prose.

Working with the course reader (currently The Riverside Reader ), they study "guidelines" for reading an essay, and immediately put those principles of analysis to work. Students are thus introduced to the serious work of close, analytical reading in this course, work that they are expected to do with systematic awareness. Students are asked to complete a first reading and ask initial questions, noticing the framework of the text (who is the author? why this title? what does the lead tell you?) and asking what dominant impression the text made upon them. In their second reading, they move to more particular analysis, jotting down responses to par ticular points and building upon their initial reflection.

Analyzing for "purpose, audience, strategy" becomes a familiar routine for students in AP English Language. Students learn that language accomplishes particular aims or purposes (for example: inform, persuade, entertain, express). Recognizing the goal behind the invention of a piece involves identifying text which shows a writer's purpose. Students develop an awareness of audience. They consider the writer's beliefs and values as implied or suggested in a text. Further, as secondary readers of the text, they speculate on assumptions the author might have made about his primary audience. They learn to ask questions pertaining to audience and experience: what knowledge does the author take for granted? how do you know? how are you like/unlike the primary audience and how does that fit (or lack thereof) affect your response to the text? what kind of historical or generic conventions are at work in a piece? Analysis and evaluation of strategies used by writers is a continuing activity in the course. In the fall, students learn to look carefully at how writers catch or engage their reader at the very beginning of their essays. They also are asked to recognize dominant patterns that connect to and serve the rhetorical purposes of the writer: definition, narration, comparison, cause and effect, etc. Strategies such as use of metaphor and other figures of speech, vivid detail and description, personal narration, invoking authority, mustering facts and statistics are identified and considered. In connection with their reading, students are asked: what do particular strategies accomplish? This means they look at the difference particular strategies make, and at the difference language (diction, syntax, point of view, tone) makes in representing thought and experience. Students consider how a writer develops or emphasizes particular segments of text by looking at how language is used, right down to the word, phrase, and sentence level. The particularity with which students examine language is a critical skill, and involves developing their ability to consider (and make the distinction between) what language says and what it does, in the manner demonstrated by Ken Bruffee ( A Short Course in Writing).

Since the course features a "college-level" curriculum, students bring to the course a demonstrable command of mechanical conventions and an ability to read and discuss inventive as well as non-fiction prose.

Semantics and Language Awareness

By understanding the roles and different uses of language, students can learn to think, speak, and write with greater clarity. They can appreciate the impact of words, phrases, utterances, and they can better appreciate textuality in its varied forms. We use the anthology About Language as well as Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action . These books feature numerous essays and ruminations involving semantics. Among topics covered are language and identity, the origin of language, contexts, slang, euphemism, jargon, advertising, political language and discourse, symbols, connotation and denotation, reports, inferences, and judgments.

Reading and Literature in AP English Language

Students consider a variety of literary texts, speculating about the writer's use of language and other choices authors made in their writing. They write essays following reading and study including analytical papers, response papers, comparisons, and other forms. During the course, students are brought to a deeper awareness of the different stylistic effects created by different syntactical choices and by different levels of diction. Since these differences are visible in fiction, literature clearly has a place in this course. However, the main purpose for including literature is to facilitate the scrutiny of linguistic and rhetorical choices, and not to study the subtleties of literary analysis. Language study is at the center of the course, and is, therefore the focus of papers written in response to literary texts read. More comprehensive college-level study of litera ture, featuring thorough study of sophisticated critical approaches to literary text, lies at the heart of the department's AP English Literature and Composition course.

While English III in its different varieties (including AP) is not a survey course, literature of the United States is featured reading and the subject of study. In part, this is because students are concurrently taking a United States history course at either the academic or AP level. More importantly, however, we want students to demonstrate familiarity with and appreciation of the nature and character of American thought, experience and artistic expression through study of its literature. As a result, some teachers devote time to study of particularly American themes, such as "The American Dream" or "The American Journey" during this course, and select literary texts with these considerations in mind. Some teachers have students read Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Kinsella's Shoeless Joe in order to explore American language and idiom. Lengthy nonfiction works such as Hellman's Pentimento and Capote's In Cold Blood are placed in a historical as well as linguistic context.

One section of this course features several shared assignments with AP United States History. These assignments connect works by Hawthorne, Twain, Fitzgerald, Williams, and Kesey to American history study. See the Core Assignments section for more details.

Macbeth is the Shakespeare play studied. The film produced by Kenneth Tynan and directed by Roman Polanski is usually shown, although other versions have been used.

Writing Tasks

Students write for different purposes as they explore what's involved in developing identity and voice as a writer. Writing tasks may result in one draft on-demand or finished pieces which are subject to extensive conferencing. Assignments cover a range of rhetorical tasks: description, narration, persuasion, explanation, language analysis, comparison/contrast. The presumed audience for much of a student's own writing in the course should be, in Gadda's words "a 'common reader' who possesses at least as much intelligence and education as the writer and has a shared interest in in the topic a writer has chosen." Students write for a variety of audiences and purposes during the year.

Students begin the year with an extensive personal narrative task, based on Donald Murray's "The Stranger in the Photo" essay. While working on this piece, students consider several narratives which demon strate distinct purposes and language use strategies. Through drafting and revising, students shape their own pieces, conferencing several times with the teacher of the course as well as with the Writing Center teacher. This pattern of linking reading to writing tasks is repeated with several of the core assignments. In one such assignment, "Cripples," students read a pair of essays which, while similar in subject, adopt different strate gies to achieve distinctive purposes. In their own essays, students analyze the audience, purpose, and strategy of each writer. Students learn to make distinctions between texts based on an developing awareness of language features and style by writing about contrasting language, rhetoric, and structure of related or comparable pieces.

As the year proceeds, students are required to grapple not only with more challenging tasks. They also must demonstrate increasing sophistication in their writing. Following "Stranger in the Photo," stu dents write a "place" paper which goes beyond identifying and evoking a sense of place by asking them to relate their selection to an extended definition of "querencia." Students write their own "definition" piece, selecting a concept, idea, or object and then setting boundaries for and describing their subject. Students learn how to use narration effectively when writing for a variety of purposes, including process analysis, definition, persuasion, argument, division and classification, or various forms of commentary. Writing effective persuasive pieces requires careful study of a wide range of examples. In this connection, students consider the form, language, and structure of several speeches and formal essays. For the final assignment of the year, students write a "college application essay" which usually proves useful the following autumn, when, in the middle of their senior year, application deadlines are closing in, and a finished essay is ready to be revised.

In all, students produce around ten finished pieces during the year; they also write and a number of short responses in connection with non-fiction prose readings. In addition, they also write "on demand" during class in response to different topics, during full period "draftless" essays modeled after AP questions. Questions are chosen which feature tasks aligned with concurrently or previously assigned readings in The Riverside Reader.

As already mentioned, conferences with the Writing Center teacher are a featured way of learning about and questioning one's own writing while it's under development. Conferences help students gain additional perspective on their writing and is critical as they learn revision skills.Conferences are often mandated in connection with the regularly assigned finished pieces; they occur while those pieces are in process, although they are sometimes held in connection with the completed versions. Students are always entitled to a conference with their teacher if requested, and they are required to have one if they receive an "R" on a core assignment.

Students learn more about writing with a purpose as they encounter challenges in language and communication and consider the effectiveness of their own work, without relying solely on the teacher's judgment as authoritative. As they become more aware of how language works and exercise and develop their capacity to read and communicate, students will become more comfortable with self-assessment. Various texts, such as Donald Murray's Write to Learn and Strunk and White's Elements of Style are used as resources by student writers.

Students are required to turn in all prewriting and drafting with their finished pieces. The develop ment of student writing is important to trace and reflect on in subsequent conference conversations. Note: papers are due at the opening of class. Papers turned in after general collection are considered late and thus are subject to late penalties.

Speaking and Listening

Students are required to speak before the class, and listen and respond to their classmates in the context of several assignments. Collaborative exercises often focus on "says/does" analysis, and include consideration of a text, negotiating consensus, and presenting results to the class. Whole-class discussions provide all students with the opportunity to present their views during class assignments. Students also present results of inde pendent summer reading in organized remarks to the class.

Outside Assessment

Testing or assessment episodes are part of the reality of schooling, particularly, it seems, junior year. There fore, some class time is devoted to familiarizing students with tests requiring writing on demand and/or demonstration of understanding of literary content. Students must take the Maine Educational Assessment along with all other 11th graders in the state during the year, and students are familiarized with that test's format. PSAT and SAT preparation is included, as most students will take these tests as part of the college application process. Preparation for the Advanced Placement examination is ongoing, as it is, obviously essential to the course and in the interest of most students to sit for the exam. Students who choose not to take the AP examination in May must take a facsimile version as their final exam in June.

Course Materials

Required texts: for use throughout the school year:

Additional texts:

Films:

Essays by:

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.

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