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Course Description

Prerequisite: English III as well as department referral (see appendix for details)

Additional instruction in the Writing Center is required.

Students with demonstrated need to develop and strengthen individual writing and reading skills in a workshop environment are referred to this course. Computers are used as a tool for writing, revising, and publishing. Each student is expected to fulfill independent reading programs keyed to his or her interests and designed to develop his or her ability. The class will also consider several key works of literature and film in line with study of voice, community, and several other themes. Each student must complete a major research project. Students will confer about their writing with Writing Center teachers.

Course Overview

This course extends the learning environment established English III Writing and Reading Lab, applying it to the goals of the English IV curriculum. The laboratory situation in the VF Grantroom shapes and defines the learning atmosphere. This course is also, in many respects, an adaptation of Academic English IV. Students in this course are placed here based upon the following criteria:

Students who need to strengthen writing and reading skills in a workshop environment are referred to this lab course. Daily writing, literary study, and independent reading are features of the instructional program, and are consistent with the outcomes for English III and IV. Reading and Writing Lab is not an elective, nor is it a "general" level course. Referrals are made to help all students address individual deficiencies in a cooperative, workshop/laboratory environment. Work with comput ers and other technologies, as tools for developing literacy skills, is a continuing feature of the course.

Before a student is enrolled in Writing and Reading Lab, the approval of the English department head is required. Students enrolled must value this special learning environment, which is designed for cooperative, mutually supportive work. Thus, referrals made to address behavioral problems or to sort students for a variety of reasons other than those stated below will not be approved. The regular English courses (Academic English III or IV) are often viable, appropriate placement options for students prepared to enter mainstream classes.

Procedures and further considerations:

I. For students currently mainstreamed, referral is made by the current English teacher, and will be based upon observed and persistent deficiency in the student's fundamental literacy skills.

a) The student's reading is laborious, difficult, and slow, even when reading materials of personal interest. Comprehension is achieved only with significant work.

b) The student's writing shows profound and recurring deficiencies in correctness, problems with sentence sense, spelling, and other fundamentals of written expression.

II. For students currently receiving instruction through special services, a request for referral is made only after consultation with the English department head and appropriate special services personnel. If, following consultation, entry is approved by the English department head, he will monitor the student's progress (working in concert with the teacher) in order to ascertain the appropriateness of the instructional setting and mode.

The goals of the course are similar to the goals for other English IV courses: to help students become individuals who will continue to learn following high school with an awareness of language, culture, and the importance of effective communication.

Here are the organizing ideas of the course:

Visions and Voices of Modern Cultures

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 enter the work force or eventually go on to some form of additional schooling after graduation, their success will depend to a great extent on their ability to understand and use the English language. That is why this course makes language itself -- and its use in various forms, genres, and media -- a key area of attention.

To live as mature human beings and functioning members of society, students need to be able to communicate with others, and that means using language. They need speaking and listening skills to be sure, and they need to be literate in the traditional sense: able to read and write. But they also need to be "literate" across a various and complex network of different kinds of writing and various communications media.

Plays, stories, letters, essays, interviews, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television shows, and yes, even application 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 and view in the fullest sense possible. Reading, in this sense of the word, means being able to place or situate a text, to understand it from the inside, sympathetically, and to step away from it and see it from the outside, critically. It means a student must see a text for what it is and to consider how it connects -- or fails to connect -- to his own life and times.

Obviously, students in this course find the language arts difficult to master. Many of them are, at best uncertain about language. However, each student, through immersion in the world of text can come to understand how language is a major part of life, and how it can be used and experienced in ways that work for, and not against, them. They can come to appreciate their individual and collective voices. That -- all that -- is what this course is about

The common features of the course as it is taught by different teachers should not be a particular set of works to be "covered," but a set of certain kinds of works to be considered and responded to in certain ways. That is, the emphasis must be on students' ability to comprehend and contend with 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, viewed, and considered. In order to make the intent of the course concrete, it will be described here in terms of specific works and projects. However, the criteria can be applied to a different array of works.

Because this is a laboratory course, reading, viewing and response will occur in the context of the lab environment. Students will complete their work on core assignments using the VF Grant computers, working with the assistance of the teacher and the Writing Center teacher. Work each week outside of class is expected. However, most work takes place in the context of the VF Grantroom.

Core assignments are assessed using a scoring guide applied to core criteria. Work is scored on the following scale: 4: Exemplary; 3 Accomplished; 2 Acceptable; 1 Rudimentary; NE No Evidence. The rela tionship between assessed performance and grades will be discussed with students as they complete tasks.

Course Units

Unit 1: Many Selves, Many Voices

At the center of this unit is the student -- and that student's relation to language. Each student will be 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 will be asked to consider their past experiences with language, and characterize their present command of language. They will be invited to take pride in what they know, and encouraged to strive to increase their linguistic range and depth.

Initially, they will consider texts which address the questions: "Who am I?" and "Who am I about?" For this purpose stories, essays, excerpts from longer works of fiction and non-fiction, and films will provide the most useful examples of linguistic grace and power in the service of personal expression and self-examination. The goal will be for students to see themselves as users of language, with voices of their own that are similar to those they encounter in texts we study. Confronting these questions about language and images, students can see themselves as active partners in the expressive process. In this mode, they should read and view not only to understand but also to emulate the text they are reading. "What can I learn from this text, this writer or director about how to express myself or think about my experience?" is a question that energizes the relationship of the student as consumer of language and text. It is that energy that should drive this whole course, and cap the English experience for our students.

Some of the selected; texts include: Saturday Night at Moody's Diner (Sample); Believer's Flood (Currey); excerpts from works by Winston Groom, Amy Tan; films Rebel Without a Cause ; and 2001: A Space Odyssey (with affiliated text by Arthur C. Clarke).

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, films, and stories about the situation of being an "other" -- a stranger in a village -- or about encountering such a stranger, will be the core readings for this unit. And, once again, students will be reading these texts in preparation for writing their own narratives about such an encounter. 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 King and O'Brien.

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," the struggle between the individual and the community is presented in strong, if sometimes ambiguous, terms.

Selected texts include: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; selected Stephen King stories; shooting scripts of The Prisoner.

Unit 3: Voices from the Past: Inheriting and Recreating Drama

This is meant to be 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. In Hamlet, 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. Finally, because it is a play written four centuries away from our own time, with a history of productions and performances, and 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.

Students will view/hear different performances on video/audio. They will discuss and write about the play not simply as a written text but as the basis for many possible realizations. They will speculate about situations, and envision possibilities for the presentation of the text. Thinking about the modern performance of a play from another time, another culture makes questions of meaning 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.

Unit 4: 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. 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, we propose studying one film as a sort of laboratory example of how the apparatus works to achieve its effects. We have used Rear Window, a film by Alfred Hitchcock, 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. Another very useful possibility for this part of the unit would be a second film by Stanley Kubrick, possibly The Shining, based on Stephen King's novel, or, as an echo to The Things They Carried by O'Brien, Full Metal Jacket . Kubrick makes the viewer very aware of the medium itself, even while using it to represent human experience.

Unit 5: Language Use and Awareness

This segment of the course is not so much a "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. Particular course activities ask students to develop their under standing 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 Language in Thought and Action throughout the course. Particular attention is paid to symbols; reports, inferences, judgments; language in context; and the language of social control.

Popular magazines and journals are examined. Advertising messages are studied in an effort to make students aware of the "messaging" that attends the textuality of the media-intensive world we live in.

Throughout the course, attention will be paid to issues of mechanical correctness and command of fundamentals. Students need to demonstrate that their expression can be more than simply rudimentary; it must reliable. Although freewriting activities (see W&R III) continues as an activity helps students unleash thought in language, it is not by any means finished or polished writing. As an activity it relates to develop ing the awareness and appreciation of language on the part of language-deficient students. Only in that context are correctness concerns secondary to expression.

Unit 6: The Senior Project

In this culminating assignment, students demonstrate the ability to access information through various modes of research, including interviews. They must organize and shape this information into a meaningful paper and an effective presentation, as they present the results of their work in a speech to the class. The subject of the project grows out of an area of personal focus they identify 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 Academic English II). The character, depth, sophistication, and dimension of inquiry is more extensive: students must pull together a body of research and highlight it in writing and through their speech. Their work must conform to appropriate academic conventions.

Core Assignments

Teachers select, revise, and invent particular core assignments in connection with the the above curriculum units. The following pages include examples of these core assignments and, when applicable, their rubrics.

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