AP English Language And Composition

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AP English Language and Composition Syllabus

Course Overview and Objectives

The overall objective of this course is to present the students with the methodology and skills needed to read and write effectively at a level comparable to those found in a first year college course. As stated in the 2007-08 AP Course Audit Manual: “Student[s] [are to] become skilled readers of prose written in a variety of disciplines and rhetorical contexts and become skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes, aware of interactions among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects”. These skills are further demonstrated through “the development of research skills that enable the student to evaluate, use and cite source material” (36).

With the above acting as the basic framework for the course the texts, materials, and arrangement of the course focus on the American literature experience. All major reading assignments, excepting 1984 as summer reading and Hamlet, are drawn from American literature. The primary objective in the reading will be analysis of how writers employ rhetorical devices in order to affect the reader.

These devices include (but are not limited to): pathos, logos, ethos, nomos, tone, style, voice, irony, rhetorical questions, parallelism, alliteration, metaphor, simile, paradox, and oxymoron, allusion, analogy, style, rhetoric, thesis, theme, anecdote, exposition, foreshadow, hyperbole, imagery, mood, motif, onomatopoeia, parody, persona, personification, pun, synecdoche, metonymy, understatement, repetition, rhetorical questions, aphorism.

Reading sources will be drawn from, but not limited to, the following:

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology by Samuel Cohen, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.

Specific essays to be used for reading particularly for rhetorical analysis:

“Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner

“Woman’s Brains” by Stephen Gould

“What’s Wrong with Animal Rights” by Vicki Hearne

“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King

“Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain” by Jessica Mitford

“Shooting an Elephant” by George Orwell

“A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift

“Where I Lived and What I Lived For” by Henry David Thoreau

“Television: The Plug-In Drug” by Marie Wynn

The Bedford Reader by X.J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron, Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.

This text is used for analysis of various cartoons and pictures that generate discussion and introductions to various writing modes. This book will also form the basis for how to approach each writing mode. Various chapters will serve for imitative forms and how to “recipes” on each of the four modes.

Chapters and brief essays of particular interest from The Bedford Reader include:

“Process Analysis”

“Comparison Contrast”

“Arguments and Persuasion”

“Cause and Effect”

Adventures in American Literature . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1996.

Specific works for analysis include, but not limited to:

“Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards

From The Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin

“Speech in the Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry

From The Crisis, Number 1 by Thomas Paine

“The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving

“To a Waterfowl” and “Thanatopsis” by William Cullen Bryant

“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Selections from Emerson’s Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

From Walden by Henry David Thoreau

“The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Novels include the following:

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (summer reading)

1984 by George Orwell (summer reading)

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dramas include the following:

Inherit the Wind by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Writing

The readings from the sources listed will serve to generate written responses that will involve expository, analytical, argumentative, imitative pieces. These written pieces will be developed through various stages. The writing process of pre-writing, drafting, evaluating (self, peer, and teacher evaluation will be practiced on most assignments), revising, and final copy.

Not all assignments will receive this process as the skill of time restricted in-class essay writing will also be practiced as the course progresses through the year.

More about the writing component of the course will discussed later.

Vocabulary

The AP Course Audit Manual states that it is expected that students develop “a wide-ranging vocabulary used appropriately and effectively”(37). To this end, students in this course are assigned weekly vocabulary units from the Vocabulary Workshop Level
F and G by Jerome Shostak, published by Sadlier Oxford. This vocabulary is meant to enhance the writing of the students and the approach taken in class is not the mere acquisition of words but rather teaching the students the subtle nuisances of word choice and how connotations of words can affect their writing.

Grammar

The early part of this course will include a review of key grammatical concepts (appositives phrases, subordinate clauses, participial phrases, and prepositional phrases) that will aid the students in sophisticated sentence formation. This will include understanding the concepts of subordination and coordination. There is an emphasis on sentence variety that can be generated through clauses and phrases. The students are taught to use sentence structure as a means to create tone and voice in their writing. A brief unit on sentence combining is used to help the students create brevity and clarity in their writing. Students are also introduced to semi-colons, dashes, parenthesis, and ellipsis as other ways to add voice, tone, style, and sophistication to their writing.

WordMasters

All AP students will participate in the WordMasters competitions. These are given four times per year. These provide excellent preparation for the type of question they will encounter in the objective portion of the AP Exam. Our district subscribes to this nationally competitive program, and our AP students are then ranked against other students from around the country who took the same quiz. Of the four quizzes, there is typically one with poetry, one nonfiction essay, one short story, and one unknown.

Course P lan

1 st semester

Since this is the first AP level course for most of my students, part of the early portion of the course focuses on establishing the atmosphere for college level work.

The first semester lays the ground work for the writing that is to be done later. Although there are writing assignments in the first semester, the focus is more on gathering the basic skills needed for upper level writing. This includes development of the grammar and vocabulary concepts outlined above. The first half of the year also lays the foundation of American literature themes, namely the unifying theme of the unique American perspective and the American Dream as portrayed in literature.

1 st Quarter (8 weeks)

Summer reading

After brief objective testing on the summer reading novels of 1984 and The Jungle , the students are introduced to the concepts of thesis, style, tone, and voice. The students are then assigned out of class writing demonstrating how these elements are incorporated in 1984. This assignment is a transition for most of the students as most have never been asked to analyze how a writer expresses herself/himself, as opposed to what the writer says or why she/he says it. The students are also expected to support their topics using direct reference from the novel in the MLA format. This assignment’s ancillary purpose is to help ascertain the writing levels for each student.

After the students have had a chance to review the teacher generated responses and feedback to this writing, a similar assignment is given on The Jungle; however, this is a timed in-class essay. Again this assignment’s primary purpose is to set the level of expectation that they need to be able to create well-formed arguments within a relatively short time frame of a 48 minute period. The students will gradually learn to break their dependence on the computer and its word processing capabilities.

American Literature

The first quarter of the year introduces the concept of the American Dream which will serve as the unifying concept of the course. Very little history is needed to be taught as most of the students are well-versed in American history at this point. We begin by examining the earliest visions of America as defined by Northern versus Southern settlers. The Puritan view of the Northerners is illustrated through “Sinners at the Hands…”, and the Southern farmer’s view is seen through William Byrd’s from A History of the Dividing Line. These pieces serve as introductions to the comparison/contrast essay and students are assigned an essay analyzing the differences in styles found in each of these pieces and how these differences reflect their visions for the New World. This is a “low key practice” writing that will serve as preparation for a major comparison contrast to follow.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is then assigned for reading. An objective test is given to insure close reading. The Socratic method of instruction is introduced and students are then grouped to lead discussions about the themes of guilt and sin as portrayed in this novel. After the students have examined the way theme is used in the novel and how characterization and symbols aid in this, the class is then assigned “The Minister’s Black Veil”. After reading this the class is then assigned a three to five page comparison/contrast essay on the portrayals of sin and guilt and its effects on the communities in these Hawthorne stories as well as the characters. This serves as the major writing assignment of the 1st quarter.

To introduce the concepts of pathos, logos, ethos, and nomos, a video clip of the final scenes from A Few Good Men is used. Students are asked to write about how each of these devices is used by the attorneys and witnesses to sway their opponents. These concepts will serve underpinnings for the entire year as we view writers’ purposes.

The next unit in American literature introduces the Colonial Period and the focus is on the rhetorical devices used in speech by Patrick Henry and in essay by Thomas Paine. The use of parallelism, repetition, allusion, rhetorical questions, irony, arguments by analogy, metaphor, simile, aphorism, and hyperbole are all demonstrated. The focus of this analysis is on the methods of persuasion that are used. The students also read from Ben Franklin’s Autobiography and Poor Richard’s Almanac to see the use of aphorism and logic being demonstrated.

The SOAPStone method of analysis as found in the AP provided sources is taught to give the class a strategy for text analysis. The example from the Ben Franklin letter about the whistle is an excellent model. This method is then employed often throughout the year especially for the more challenging readings.

Vocabulary (this schedule is used throughout the year, approx. 20-25 weeks)

The course introduces 20 words per week. The main purpose each unit is to have the students see how specialized words can aid in establishing tone and voice in writing. Words are introduced each Monday, concentrating on the unique usage and connotation of each word. Students demonstrate mastery of the words through self-created sentences. These sentences are also used throughout the year as practice for grammatical concepts as they are introduced. A vocabulary quiz on the new words as well as from previous units is given each Friday.

Grammar

The foundations of the year are created in this quarter as I have found it necessary to review the basic labels of clauses and phrases through an analysis of comma usage. This unit is often tedious, but it does wonders as we can now discuss the writing of the students with a common vocabulary. For example, I can say, “This sentence would be more effective with an appositive, rather than a second simple sentence.” Or “The participial phrase at the beginning will create more excitement for the reader.”

2 nd Quarter (9 weeks)

The Art of Persuasion

Building on the reading from speeches and essays from the Colonial Period in American Literature, two more current persuasive selections are introduced from The Bedford Reader. These are “Why I Stopped being Vegetarian” by Laura Fraser and “A Vegetarian Philosophy” by Peter Singer.

The students then write their own persuasive essays using these and the Colonial writers as models. They also demonstrate mastery of the rhetorical devises by employing several in their essays. Following peer and teacher feedback and revisions, the students are ready to create persuasive speeches.

After listening to Martin Luther King’s oration of the “I Have a Dream” speech to learn how voice and inflection help to create affect, the students then create speeches that are presented to the class and scored with a provided rubric. We then discuss the way that rhetorical devices can be employed effectively in a speech versus an essay.

Inherit the Wind

A video clip from the movie Thank You for Smoking is shown to illustrate the use of logical fallacies to persuade an audience. Examples of these fallacies seen in the film include: oversimplifications, ad hominum, begging the question, post hoc, false claims, expert testimony, either/or reasoning are seen in the movie. Then the play is read and analysis is made of the ways that characters use sarcasm and expert testimony is used to sway an audience. We discuss the role of persuasion in both a courtroom and advertising as these are the two areas my students are most familiar. The class then writes an informal brief persuasive piece (1-2 pages) in which they employ several of the fallacies to “sell” the rest of the class a fictitious product or persuade us to follow a largely unaccepted concept, such get the reader to accept the viability Greek mythology or that the Law of Gravity can be altered.

American Literature

The chronological movement continues into Romanticism with “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Hawthorne in which tone and irony are examined. Romantic poetry of William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl” as analyzed for their consistency with the theme of nature in Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven” serve to demonstrate the ways mood and tone are developed through word choice, onomatopoeia, and alliteration. These works also illustrate the use of a narrator’s point of view as an effective means for integrating a theme. An imitative/creative writing assignment is then given where the students create their own descriptive paragraphs and incorporate the above devices to effectively create mood to the audience.