AP English Language (H Am Lit Comp) (Period 12 (2/6))

           Students in this introductory college-level course read and carefully analyze a broad and challenging range of nonfiction and fiction prose selections, deepening their awareness of rhetoric and 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.  Course readings feature expository, analytical, personal, and argumentative texts from a variety of authors and course contexts.  Students examine and work with essays, letters, speeches, novels, images, and imaginative literature.  Featured authors include Henry David Thoreau, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther King, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, etc.

            Students frequently confer about their writing in workshop-type centers as well as in class.  Off-track (summer, Xmas, spring break) reading and writing are required.  Students prepare for the exam and may be granted advanced placement, college credit, or both as a result of a satisfactory performance.

            Central course textbooks include Pearson’s Writing America and Norton’s Back to the Lake although Pearson’s “My Perspectives” and The Bedford Reader may also be consulted, as well as approximately 12 other novel type books to be read independently.

            Course reading and writing activities should help students gain textual power, making them more alert to an author’s purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of the subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone.  By early may of the school year, students will have nearly completed a course in close reading and purposeful writing.  The critical skills that students learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction 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 texts (prose and image based) and writing tasks provide the focus for an energetic study of language, rhetoric, and argument. 

            As this is a college-level course, performance expectations are appropriately high, and the workload is challenging.  Students are expected to commit to a minimum of five hours of course work per week outside of class.  Often, this work involves long-term writing and reading assignments, so effective time management is important.  Because of the demanding curriculum, students must bring to the course sufficient command of mechanical conventions and an ability to read and discuss prose.  The course is constructed in accordance with the guidelines described in the AP English Course Description.