Pre-AP English Language and Composition

Mrs. Collins-Stevens

Room D233

Email:

Course Description: This is the first year of a two year college level course that will culminate in taking the AP Language and Composition Exam. The goal of this course is to give students the skills necessary to succeed in the AP Language course. Scholars will study non-fiction texts to learn to read critically, think analytically, and communicate clearly in both writing and speech. Scholars will become aware of how writers’ linguistic choices create effective writing and achieve stylistic effects, as well as how to effectively incorporate many of these techniques into their own writing.

Essential Question for the course: What does an author’s style reveal about his purpose?

Learning Goals:

  • Understanding rhetoric, and the author’s purposes and choices around this concept
  • Understanding main point, thesis, occasion, context, tone, and style
  • Understanding how a text is created to develop meaning and purpose including genre, organization, paragraphing, syntax
  • Understanding the relationship of the text’s creation to its accomplishment, the purpose of academic intellectual prose, its meaning and effect
  • Understanding how to articulate what is found in analysis of reading; how the organizational structure, diction, syntax, imagery, and figurative language flesh out the meaning of the text
  • Understanding how to create, develop and support an argument, acknowledging the complexities and nuances of important issues
  • Understanding how to enter into a conversation with sources and develop a thesis and argument or exposition by synthesizing these conversations into writing
  • Understanding how to analyze and incorporate analysis of visual texts into writing
  • Understanding effective research skills and proper MLA citation
  • Understanding how to read a question
  • Understanding the strategies necessary to succeed on the AP English Language and Composition exam

Course Requirements:

  1. Complete all of the reading as it is required. You must be prepared to discuss and/or write about the literature.
  2. Bring a 2 inch, 3 ring binder to class with you EVERY DAY. You will need dividers to split your binder into sections for reading (literature notes), writing (essays), grammar, rhetoric, and vocabulary/literary terms. There will be notebook checks for a grade each marking period.
  1. Complete writing assignments in a timely fashion. Essays are due on a particular day! No assignments will be accepted late!
  2. You will be required to complete a timed, in­class writing assignment AT LEAST every other week.
  3. You will be responsible for completing assignments for the “Allusion Workshop.” (Explanation for Allusion Workshops to come)
  4. You will have frequent opportunities to write and rewrite formal, extended analyses and timed, in­class responses. You will receive instruction and feedback on writing assignments that help you develop.
  5. You must have a Three-ring Binder, dividers, a folder, loose leaf paper, a blue or black pen, and a pencil with you in class each day.
  6. As this is a higher level course, you should be competent writers and recognize that the workload is both challenging and places a high level of expectation on you with regard to performance. Effective time management is crucial

Grading System:

Criteria% Distribution

Writing30%

Class Work40%

Homework10%

Tests/Quizzes20%

SOAPSTone Strategy for Text Analysis

Speaker – the individual or collective voice of the text

Occasion – the event or catalyst causing the writing of the text to occur

Audience – the group of readers to whom the piece is directed

Purpose – the reason behind the text

Subject – the general topic or main idea

Tone – the attitude of the author

Major Writing Assignments:

Analytical Essays - scholars will compose rhetorical analysis from prompts focusing on readings

Personal Narratives – scholars will compose an effective essay focusing on the significance of a single event in their lives

Compare/Contrast Essay – scholars will compose an essay in which they contrast rhetorical strategies used by two different authors/speakers

Current Issue Project – Scholars focus on a public discourse topic, and compose six persuasive texts on behalf of a specific ballot initiative – 3 meant to be spoken and 3 meant to be read – each to specific audiences: supporters, fence-sitters, and opponents. Scholars must submit self-annotated copies of each text highlighting the rhetorical strategies they incorporated.

Columnist Project – scholars gather six columns from a columnist of their choice. They will summarize each column and write a reaction to it. Then they will compose an argumentative essay by developing an argument inspired through “conversations” with the columnist.

Synthesis Essay – scholars synthesize materials from a number of sources, develop an argument, and compose an argumentative essay.

Open Topic/Genre Essay – using the five canons of rhetoric – invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery – scholars compose a meaningful essay on the topic of their choice. Scholars must submit a self-annotated copy of the essay highlighting the rhetorical strategies they incorporated. They will share their papers by presenting them to the class.

Research Paper – scholars experience the research process from discovering a topic and developing a research question to submitting the final product. They will understand all levels of the process including discerning relevant sources, gathering information from diverse sources, synthesizing that information and properly formatting the paper, incorporating MLA citation techniques. This paper may be expository or argumentative.

Frequent in-class, timed writing assignments will be given. They will be scored in “AP Style” – on a scale of 0-9, according the Collegeboard AP Essay Rubric.

Sample Units

Disclaimer: units will not necessarily be taught in this order and activities are merely samples, and are not set in stone

  • The Nuts and Bolts of Writing – focus on grammar, punctuation, parts of speech, mechanics, parallel structure, sentence structure, writing a sentence, writing a paragraph, thesis statements

Essential Questions for Unit:

  1. How can I become a better writer through the use of standard grammar and usage?
  2. How is grammar important to my success in communicating with others through writing?
  3. How is developing a strong, clear thesis statement important in essay writing?

Activities for Unit:

  1. Show Grammar Rock
  2. Loop Cards Game
  3. Preposition Poems
  4. Grammar Puzzles
  5. 3-D Preposition
  6. Editing writing using CUPS – Capitalization, Usage and Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling
  7. Color Code Parts of Speech
  8. Practice writing effective sentences, paragraphs, and thesis statements
  9. Play Adjective/Adverb Memory
  10. Play Adverb Charades
  • Myths and Legends – Greek and Roman

Text: Mythic Voices: “The Making of Gods and People,” “Hermes, Lord of Robbers,” “Heracles and the Hydra,” “Theseus and the Minotaur,” “The Trojan War,” “The Voyage of Odysseus,” “Demeter and Persephone,” “Eros and Psyche”

Essential Questions for Mythology Unit:

  1. What role can myths and belief from the past have in today’s world
  2. How does the definition of a hero change? Why?
  3. How do we use stories to explain the world

around us?

Themes of Mythology Unit:

  • Human Flaws
  • Temptation
  • Payback and Reward
  • Brain over Brawn
  • War
  • Love
  • Fate
  • Beauty

Projects for Mythology Unit:

  1. Create a plot diagram of a Greek Myth in a six-cell storyboard
  2. Greek Gods Character Map
  3. TP-CASTT a Greek Poem
  4. Make a Modern Greek God
  5. Mythological Allusions Presentations
  • Understanding Rhetoric/Analyzing Rhetoric- Focus on defining rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, close reading, annotating, literary analysis, tone, audience, and rhetorical strategies. The 5 traditional canons of rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery, Aristotelian appeals: ethos, pathos, logos

Essential Questions for Unit:

  1. What is rhetoric, both effective and ineffective?
  2. Why is it important to think about both the ways in which we use language and the ways in which others use language?
  3. What various styles do authors employ to achieve different purposes in writing?

Activities for Unit:

1.Analyze videos, MLK’s “I Have a Dream” and Mos Def’s “It Ain’t My Fault,” for rhetorical strategies used

2.Rhetoric in Advertisement Project

3.Analyze famous speeches

4.Rhetorical Devices Teaching Project

  • Argument -Scholars will become familiar with terms for rhetorical devices and analyze the relationship between subject, speaker, and audience (Rhetorical Triangle). Scholars will examine various texts and identify the use and effectiveness of the rhetorical appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos

Essential Questions:

  1. Why is it important to recognize that there are often 2 sides to every issue?
  2. Why is it important to be able to take a stand (defend, challenge, or qualify) on a given issue?
  3. How have people, past and present, successfully brought about change through persuasion?

Activities for Unit:

  1. Ethos, Pathos and Logos in Action Storyboards
  2. Making visual arguments
  3. Group Argument Project

.

  • Synthesis– focus on how synthesis is different than summarizing, how synthesis helps a reader to understand more clearly what they have read and how to pull all of their strategies together, how to extend their synthesis of a literal meaning of a text to an inferential level, and give readers an opportunity to share, recommend, and criticize reading.

Essential Questions:

  1. How can one synthesize various pieces to come to an informed position on an issue?
  2. How can scholars quickly and effectively read and comprehend main ideas from source documents?
  3. How does a scholar identify and evaluate the primary focus, logic, style and structure of a text and how they support a student’s position or purpose in writing?
  4. How are documents synthesized into coherent, well-constructed responses to a given writing prompt?

Activities for Unit:

  1. Readings and Essays around the following topics:

Education, Gender, Politics, Violence, Poverty

  1. We may analyze some of the following columnists:

Nicholas Kristof, Barbara Ehrenreich, George Will, David Brooks, Thomas Frank, Maureen Dowd

  • Voice Lessons -focus on Diction, Detail, Imagery, Syntax and Tone
  • Research Paper

In this assignment, you will demonstrate that you:

•have established your own voice

•can use it to shape the opinions of your readers

•are able to evaluate the voices and ideas of others

•are able to develop your own opinions about issues that matter to you

•are able to extrapolate information from different modes of discourse to support your opinion

•understand MLA research protocol for in-text citations and works cited documents

Preparation: Read a nonfiction book. A suggested list follows, but you may choose outside the list. As you are reading—even before you read—you will keep a journal of op-ed columns. These may not cover one subject at first, but should start to reveal your interest in a specific issue, or should reflect the key issues in your nonfiction book. Collect columns about your issue that agree with and refute your position on the issue. Finally, you need to seek a short story that touches on your chosen topic.*

Using your issues-based non-fiction book, you will narrow down your ideas and raw data to a single issue in the “real world” that interests you. You will then focus your op-ed column journal on that issue and collect additional material about it.

Task: Establish the issue you want to explore. Create an arguable thesis statement that identifies your opinion on the issue. Use your collected sources (nonfiction book, op-ed columns, short story, and any other critical or related material) to support your thesis.

The final result will be a research-supported opinion piece (a “researched argument” or synthesis essay), in which you will synthesize your sources and develop your own opinion about that issue.

Suggested nonfiction texts:

Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, The ,Steven Pinker

Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Braid, Douglas Hofstadter

Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, The ,David McCollough

Liberty Defined: Fifty Essential Issues that Affect Our Freedom, Ron Paul

March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam,The Barbara Tuchman

New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The ,Michelle Alexander

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, The, MichaelPollan

Rational Optimist, The ,Matt Ridley

True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, The ,Eric Hoffer

Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, The ,Isabel Wilkerson

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, Glenn Greenwald

World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, The, Thomas Friedman

Housekeeping:

  1. Plan to stay in the classroom once you have arrived, and come prepared.Do not ask for a bathroom, drink, or locker pass.
  2. Cell Phones or any other device may not be out in class.
  3. You may drink in class, but may not bring food of any kind into the classroom.
  4. You must be on time to class. If you are late, make sure that you have a valid pass. If you come late to class with a pass, please do not disrupt the class. Come into the room quietly and have a seat.
  5. It is YOUR responsibility to make up work after an absence. You may ask me for makeup work after class, NOT during class. You may also check my website to see what you missed.
  6. I check my email often. Please email me with any questions or to schedule an appointment to meet in person.
  7. Please understand that in an AP level course, there will be outside work required and up to an hour of homework given each night.

I have read the entire syllabus and understand what is required of me/my child.

Parent Signature:______

Scholar Signature: ______