Complete Syllabus for AP Language and Composition Course Overview: AP Language and Composition/American Literature is a twosemester college-level course. The purpose of this course is to expose students to a variety of texts and styles of writing with an emphasis on nonfiction. Students will cover the basic elements of rhetoric: writing with a purpose, addressing and appealing to an audience, creating effective text, and acquiring an appropriate style. Much of the year is spent on argumentation and the skills of synthesizing, summarizing, and responding to the reading. A literary analysis and a research paper with proper MLA citations are both mandatory for all students completing the course as well as several other major multidraft papers. As this course also counts for the junior year of English, students are also expected to cover a variety of classic American literature chronologically and understand the major eras and the historical context in which these works were composed. Primary texts used in the course: 50 Essays, Cohen The Eloquent Essay: An Anthology of Classic and Creative Nonfiction, Loughery Reading Critically, Writing Well: A Reader and Guide, Axelrod and Cooper Literature and Language: American Literature, McDougal Littell Short Takes: Model Essays for Composition, Penfield The Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate The Best Essays of the Century, Oates The Fourth Genre, Root The Elements of Style, Strunk and White The Gatekeepers, Steinberg The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne The Crucible, Miller Evangeline, Longfellow Walden, Thoreau Civil Disobedience and Other Writings, Thoreau Self-Reliance and Other Collected Essays, Emerson The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass Turn of the Screw, James The Wasteland and Other Poems, Eliot The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald Catcher in the Rye, Salinger NOTE: From the beginning of the year, students will take an AP practice test at least once a month, both a section of an objective test and one free response question. By the end of the year, students will be taking 90 minute practice tests on block days and at least one three-hour practice test in the after-school writing lab before the actual AP test date.
Unit One: Course Orientation and Introduction to Close Reading/ The Personal Narrative (three weeks) The year begins The Cather in the Rye by Salinger and a discussion of narrative voice and the use of symbolism and The Gatekeepers by Steinberg. Students also read from Chapter One of Reading Critically, Writing Well, all examples of the personal narrative, including The Chase by Annie Dillard, Smooth and Easy by Russell Baker, and Land of the Doo-Wops by Itabari Njeri; they also read narratives from other texts like The Eloquent Essay ( A Hanging by Orwell, How Mr. Dewey Decimal Saved My Life by Kingsolver) and 50 Essays ( Learning to Read by Malcolm X, A Clack of Tiny Sparks by Bernard Cooper, and The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me by Sherman Alexie) and others by writers like David Sedaris ( Me Talk Pretty One Day ) and Scott Russell Sanders ( The Inheritance of Tools and Under the Influence ). IMPORTANT NOTE: Students are required to study various forms of rhetoric and recognize rhetorical devices in their written responses to their readings throughout the school year.) To encourage writing about the self, students read and discuss Langston Hughes poem Theme for English B and write a one-page essay about themselves. They will also complete a take-home essay on the themes, symbolism, and narrative voice in Cather in the Rye (Major Paper #2) and a take-home essay on The Gatekeepers (Major Papers #1 an #2). The student will share rough drafts with a peer group and write a second draft to be read by the instructor. The teacher will meet with the student in a one-on-one conference either during class or in the after-school writing lab to discuss changes/improvements, after which the student will write the final draft and turn it in for evaluation. Students are also required to write in a journal at least 25 times each quarter. Also during the first two-weeks, students will discuss essays on education and take one practice AP objective exam after which they will score and discuss their answers in small groups. After this discussion, students will write their first practice essay (an actual AP practice test prompt) which will then be scored according to the AP scale and returned to the student with written commentary. From this point on, students will be writing approximately two practice essays every month; students are responsible for keeping track of their scores and noting which skills they need to work on. Finally, students begin the year with vocabulary study, using the list provided of the 100 words college freshmen most need to know and a list of words that can be used to define tone and a list of rhetorical devices. This vocabulary study is on-going. Unit Two: The Early Americans 1600-1800 (six weeks) In this unit, students study the foundations of American literature, including a look at Native American songs and poetry. They also study Bradford s Of Plymouth Plantation and What Is An American? by Crevecoeur (among others).
The influence of the Puritans is studied in depth as they read Jonathan Edward s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne, The Crucible by Miller, and We Aren t Superstitious by Stephen Vincent Benet. Moving on to the revolutionary experience, students read Patrick Henry s Speech in the Virginia Convention and Thomas Paine s The Crisis and Common Sense. We also read The Declaration of Independence and compare that to Elizabeth Cady Stanton s Declaration of Sentiments. Finally, they read Franklin s Autobiography. Also, students read and analyze Franklin s satires and read A Modest Proposal by Swift. This unit ends with a look at the introduction of slavery to the colonies with readings from From Africa to America by Olaudah Equiano and a segment from Haley s Roots. Throughout Quarter One students are also expected to learn over 50 rhetorical terms; they define each term and identify terms in their readings. They also learn to identify parallel structure and loose and periodic sentences as they study sentence variety. Students are also given exercises on combining sentences and varying sentence length and structure with various clauses and phrases. Students also learn the SOAPStone model for rhetorical analysis (subject, occasion, audience, purpose, tone). By the end of quarter one, the teacher is underlining such rhetorical devices and evidence of more sophisticated syntax and diction in the students writing to encourage use of such skills by showing examples of student writing on the overhead projector before final drafts are returned. Students also cover lessons during this unit on moving from the general to the specific in their writing, including a discussion of how several of the essays already read do just that. Unit Three: American Classics 1800-1900 (nine weeks) In their second quarter of study, students are introduced to the major voices of classic American lit, including the Romantics, the Transcendentalists, and the Realists. We begin with short stories by Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Bierce, Cather, Chopin, and Twain. We cover poetry by Longfellow (including the full-length version of Evangeline), Crane, Whitman, and Dickinson. We also read the short play by Crane, Bride Comes to Yellow Sky and discuss the frontier myth and its relation to the American Dream and Manifest Destiny. Students then give a presentation on an author of their choice. Nonfiction includes Lincoln s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, Sojourner Truth s Ain t I a Woman, Frederick Douglass Untie His Hands and sections from his autobiography. A major focus of this unit: essays of Emerson and Thoreau. Students read most of Thoreau s Walden and several essays from Emerson, including Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, and The Divinity School Address. We also read other nature writings by authors like Annie Dillard s Death of a Moth and Living Like Weasels. We finish this unit of nonfiction with segments of Harriet Jacobs autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and readings from the WPA Slave Narratives. Students choose a slave narrative from the WPA site, write a summary of their chosen person s narrative, and share their findings with the class.
We continue our reading in 50 Essays, focusing on issues of racism and prejudice. To this end we read and discuss two essays from The Eloquent Essay: The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank by Bettelheim and finish with Huck at 100 by Leo Marx, prefaced by a reading the novel Huck Finn. This leads directly into their writing for this unit, which is a persuasive essay (with citations) on whether Huck Finn should remain in the canon of American literature (Major Paper #3). This persuasive essay serves as the focal point of their study throughout the quarter of argumentation and persuasion, for which they read more examples of argument from 50 Essays such as Women s Brains by Gould and Animal Liberation by Singer. Students also review Aristotle s rhetorical triangle (audience, speaker, subject) as well the ideas of purpose and context along with the SOAPStone model to develop arguments and write several short persuasive papers leading up to the multi-draft persuasive essay on Huck. This paper, again, begins with a rough draft shared with peer edit group, a conference with the teacher after draft two, and then a final draft to be graded. The semester comes to a close with a test over all rhetorical devices, an overview of the Elements of Style by Strunk and White, questions on the periods of American lit covered so far, a take-home essay evaluating their progress in AP Language and Comp thus far, and an in-class rhetorical analysis of an essay. Unit Four: Between the Wars Literature 1900-1945 (six weeks) The period of literature that spans the years between the two World Wars is rich; students read short stories by Anderson, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. They read poetry by Frost, Sandburg, Robinson, Hughes, Millay, and Cummings as well as selections from Masters Spoon River Anthology and T.S. Eliot s work The Wasteland and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Students also read The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald s essay The Crack Up, as well excerpts from Steinbeck s The Grapes of Wrath. They also watch the film Their Eyes Were Watching God and read Zora Neale Hurston s essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me and the essay Looking for Zora by Alice Walker, paying particular attention to style and use of symbolism in preparation for their literary analysis. During a discussion of gender roles (in conjunction with Hurston), students also read Life With Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant by Gerald Early from The Best American Essays of the Century. During this unit (the beginning of semester 2), students study the various classifications of the essay using the writing text Short Takes, including description, cause and effect, comparison/contrast, process analysis, definition, classification, and a recap of narration. Students will both read and write short examples of each type. At the end of this unit of study, having read a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, students prepare to write their formal literary analysis by beginning with an appropriate thesis for an analysis, an outline, use of quotes, and cite those quotations within the body of the paper as well as on a works cited page. This literary analysis then goes through the process of a rough draft shared with peer edit group, a meeting with the teacher on draft #2, and then a final draft to be graded (Major Paper #4)
Unit Five: Position/Argumentative Papers (three weeks) Students read essays from The Eloquent Essay like The Cowboy and His Cow by Abbey, Is Hunting Ethical? by Causey, and Baloney Detection by Carl Sagan. The focus turns more specifically to writing an argument by discussing several short position papers from Reading Critically and Writing Well with subjects ranging from motorcycle helmet laws to religion in schools. Students take notes on lectures on a review of Aristotle s rhetorical pyramid and the three appeals (ethos, logos, and pathos) and are responsible for identifying these major ideas in the arguments they are reading and writing. Student also practice the synthesis essay by completing a reading of essays on free speech and developing an argument from using at least three of these sources. For further practice with the synthesis, students choose a controversial topic and find essays, cartoons, and editorials on this topic then write a synthesis question for selections and share those with the class. Students then write a response to the synthesis question (Major paper #5). This synthesis essay goes through a rough draft shared with group, a second draft shared in conference with the teacher, and a third draft to be graded. Unit Six: The Research Paper/Personal Essay (nine weeks/all of the last quarter; concurrent with the following literature units) For their required research paper, students may select a classic American film and write a research paper on this movie (concept adapted from David Klingenberger, AP instructor/trainer), including how the film relates to our discussion of what is American and how it relates to the literature we ve read. Students will review finding sources, checking the reliability of sources, and citing sources parenthetically (both AP and MLA styles will be covered). Possible films include such classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, The Birds, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, Star Wars, On the Waterfront, and Streetcar Named Desire. They may also choose to write a personal essay including research on their topic (Major Paper #6). Also during this unit students continue their practice for the AP exam by completing several objective tests (culled from earlier exams) and answering at least three practice essays, one of which will be a teacher-generated synthesis essay on racism. Unit Seven: The Civil Rights Movement (three-four weeks) Students read a variety of works by African-American writers and their importance to The Movement. Readings include The Ethics of Living Jim Crow by Richard Wright, My Dungeon Shook and Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, Necessary to Protect Ourselves by Malcolm X, Letter from Birmingham Jail and I Have a Dream by M.L King, The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King by Elizabeth Hardwick, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Angelou, and excerpts from Coming of Age in Mississippi by Moody.
Unit Six: The Modern Era 1950-present (five weeks) During the last quarter students read short fictional works by Anne Tyler, Flannery O Connor, Alice Walker, and Tim O Brien and the short play Trifles by Susan Glaspell. We also read poetry by Dove, Brooks, Angelou, and Roethke. Our nonfiction reading focuses on more essays from 50 Essays, including White s Once More to the Lake, Lars Dumpster Diving, and Why Don t We Complain by William F. Buckley. Students are also asked to read Gertrude Stein s essay What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them in preparation for our visit to an art museum and response to a particular piece of art from a current exhibit. As the AP exam draws nearer, students continue to practice both the objective and essay parts of the exam, and all students are required to attend one or both of the scheduled three-hour practice exams to prepare them for the time allotted on the actual exam. Once the exam is over (in mid-may), we focus our study on contemporary American fiction. During these final weeks, students form small literature circles and each circle reads a different work of contemporary literature. The list of books from which they can choose includes Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Foer, The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks, The Spelling Bee by Myla Goldberg, All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidder, The Things They Carried by Tim O Brien, and many others. The year ends with group presentations for the class from each reading circle. Students are also encouraged to write creatively by selecting one of the choices from the packet provided for their final paper (Major Paper #7). Final Exam: The final exam for the course is an extensive overview of American lit (objective test), a test on the vocabulary for the year, and an in-class reflective essay test on their second semester in AP Language and Composition.