English 11/ AP English Language & Composition
Students may take the course at grade level or as the first year of a two-year AP sequence that prepares students first for the AP English Language and Composition test and in the 12th grade for the AP English Literature and Composition test. Based around literature, the course also includes works of non-fiction--including essays, journals, speeches, autobiography, and letters--that correspond with each unit. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories, Melville Fascicle 13, Emily Dickinson Stories from Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and Hemingway's In Our Time As I Lay Dying, Faulkner Readings from the Harlem Renaissance Excerpts from Invisible Man, Ellison |
In order to build academic reading and writing skills, the course treats many non-fiction texts and uses Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say as well as a workbook that teaches rhetorical devices and terminology. To augment our study of rhetoric and to continue our literary studies, our Shakespeare play for grade 11 is Othello. Students who elect to take the course at the AP level can expect additional readings, some out-of-class meetings, more sophisticated writing assignments, and some test preparation. The summer reading book for AP Language is Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings. The winter reading book is Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In eleventh grade, grammar study is mostly through usage. Vocabulary study, including etymology, emphasizes words in context as well as literary and rhetorical terms. |