Grade Level:  11 or 12 High School

Subject Area:  Language Arts

Course Number:  L453211

Course Title:  AP English Literature and Composition

Course Length:  1 year

Prerequisite: Successful completion of Pre-AP English 10 or English 10 AND (strongly recommended) successful completion of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment tests in Reading and Written Composition

Course Description: In this rigorous course, students perform careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature that will deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers.  Students read works from several genres and periods from the 16^th to the 21^st centuries, representing a variety of cultures, but focusing primarily on British and American writers. Students work on the critical analysis of literature and write expository, analytical, and argumentative essays.  Students develop and organize ideas in clear, coherent, and persuasive written language and are attentive to the elements of style.  In their writing, students learn to use extensive vocabulary, demonstrate effective use of rhetoric and tone, and maintain a consistent voice. Students will take the AP Literature and Composition exam in May.

Standards and Benchmarks:

For the AP English Literature and Composition course, students will:

• engage in intense study, through literature from British, American, and world writers, including several genres from classical to contemporary times
• analyze the structure, style and literary elements in well-written interpretive essays
• write and orally express critical literary analysis and response to the social and historical values reflected in the literature
• write extended, formal essays that demonstrate the skills of writing to understand, writing to explain, and writing to evaluate
• make careful observations of textual detail, establish connections among their observations, and draw from those connections a series of inferences leading to an interpretive conclusion about the meaning and value of the piece
• use literary vocabulary accurately and effectively; use a variety of sentence structures; balance general and specific, illustrative detail; and use rhetoric effectively 

Scope and Sequence:

English Literature and Composition AP is a college-level course for high school students who desire to take rigorous programming in the English/Language Arts discipline.  It is recommended that students take a sequence of both AP English Language and Composition and AP English Literature and Composition, usually in the 11^th and 12^th grades respectively.

Content-based Instructional Practices:

The focus on the reading and writing components of the course are adapted from the College Board website:

Reading

This course includes intensive study of representative works from various genres and periods, concentrating on works of recognized literary merit.  The works chosen invite and gratify rereading.

Reading in an AP course should be both wide and deep. In this AP course, students will read works from several genres and periods --- from the sixteenth to the twenty-fist century --- but more importantly, they will get to know a few works well.  They will read deliberately and thoroughly, taking time to understand a work’s complexity, to absorb its richness of meaning, and to analyze how that meaning should consider the social and historical values it reflects and embodies.  Careful attention to both textual detail and historical context should provide a foundation for interpretation, whatever critical perspectives are brought to bear on the literary works studied.

Writing

Although critical analysis makes up the bulk of student writing for the course, creative writing assignments may help students see from the inside how literature is written.  The goal of both types of writing assignments is to increase students’ ability to explain clearly, cogently, even elegantly, what they understand about literary works and why they interpret them as they do.

Writing instruction includes attention to developing and organizing ideas in clear, coherent and persuasive language; a study of the elements of style; and attention to precision and correctness as necessary.  Throughout the course, students will develop stylistic maturity, which for AP English, is characterized by the following:

·        Wide-ranging vocabulary used with denotative accuracy and connotative resourcefulness

·        A variety of sentence structures, including appropriate use of subordinate and coordinate constructions

·        A logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques of coherence such as repetition, transitions, and emphasis

·        A balance of generalization with specific, illustrative detail

·        An effective use of rhetoric, including controlling tone, maintaining a consistent voice, and achieving emphasis through parallelism and antithesis

Students will use writing as a vehicle for demonstrating their understanding of close reading, including:

Writing to Understand

            • Writing response and reaction papers

            • Explorations of annotations

            • Freewriting

            • Keeping a reading journal

Writing to Explain

            • Analysis and interpretation pieces

            • Focused analyses on aspects of language and structure

Writing to Evaluate

• Making and explaining judgments about literary works and the author’s construction of the work

• Exploring social and cultural values through analysis, interpretation, and argumentation

• Students will work in small groups to practice the oral communication about the literature to deepen and extend their understanding of the text. 

• Students will study rhetorical devices such as figurative language and analogies and will analyze their effect on the reader, especially through the study of poetry. 

• Students will write literary analysis that will apply the critical lenses such as feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, psychological/psychoanalytical, and historical/biographical criticism studied throughout the course.

Assessments (on-going, formative and summative):

• Emphasis will be on weekly in-class and/or out-of-class writing assignments that will require students to demonstrate command of writing for understanding, writing to explain, writing to evaluate, and writing interpretation of literature.

• Student writing will be assessed using rubrics established for AP English exams, which are scored from 1-9

• Students are expected to demonstrate growth in use of vocabulary, variety of sentence structure, logical organization, balance of generalization and illustrative detail, and effective use of rhetoric as they revise their work based on teacher and peer feedback

• Other assessments may include;

·        Research and demonstrated understanding of MLA citations.

·        Periodic objective assessments of student’s knowledge of literary devices. 

·        Practice multiple choice and essay tests from released exams. 

• The AP Literature and Composition exam taken in May.   

Instructional Materials:

·        The following authors are listed to suggest the range and quality of reading expected in the course and may vary somewhat from year to year: Poetry - William Blake, Robert Browning, Geoffrey Chaucer, T. S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Robert Frost, and William Shakespeare; Drama – William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Oscar Wilde, Lorraine Hansberry, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Tom Stoppard, Ntozake Shang; Fiction (Novel and Short Story) -  Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry Fielding, Richard Wright, Alice Walker, Charlotte Brontë, and Thomas Hardy; Expository Prose – Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Johnson, Norman Mailer, John Stuart Mill, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf.  Classroom sets of selected authors will be available.

·        MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers.  

·        Hacker, Diane.  A Pocket Style Manual: Fourth Edition.  Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

·        Appelman, Deorah.  Critical Encounters In High School English: Teaching Literary theory to Adolescents Literary lenses.  Teacher’s College Press, 2000.

·        Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense.

Technology and Internet:

·        http://www.ncte.org  National Council of Teachers of English

·        http://www.twc.org Teachers and Writers Collaborative

·        http://www.ruminator.com/hmr/100.html  Ruminator Review’s 100 Best 20^th Century American Books.

·        http://mde.state.mn.us/bestpractice/BestPractices.htm

Best Practices Network of Minnesota Teachers in Writing and Literature.

·        http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180

Billy Collins, poet laureate of the U.S. presents 180 poems, one for each day of the school year

·        http://www.mla.org

·        http://apcentral.collegeboard.com

AP Central has many useful websites under “Teacher Resources.”  Some of the web sites are very specific like “Picturing Hemingway” or “John Donne.”

·        http://www.carleton.edu/departments/EDST/faculty/appelman/index.html

Deborah Appelman’s home page that gives some links to her handouts.

• http://mrbraiman.home.att.net/lit.htm This is a list of literary devices.  

Suggested adaptations for English Language Learner, for Gifted and Talented and for Special Education students:

There will be few students in this class who are ELL or special education students.  However, individuals who need work on grammar and language will be given practice work from the English Learner’s Companion and the Adapted Learner’s Companion.  Students who need more time for the AP exams, with the help of their special education teacher, may apply for extra time on the exams.

An updated version of this curriculum is available online at www.thecenter.spps.org.  Anchor lessons and common assessments for all courses are or will be available online. 

District course numbers and titles have specific assigned standards that are required regardless of where the course is taught.