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Information About This Course

Advanced Placement English Language and Composition is a two semester college-level class with college-level requirements.  An Advanced Placement class is not just an honors or accelerated regular class. 

Advanced Placement (AP) English Language and Composition examines the ways in which writers utilize the English language by engaging students in becoming skilled readers in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts and in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes.  Therefore, the course requires both concentrated reading of prose written in a variety of periods and extensive writing in multiple genres.  You will read the works of many respected writers (predominantly, American) in numerous genres—letters, short stories, novels, essays, speeches, autobiographies, and biographies—in order to examine how writers use language to persuade, educate, enrage, and even entertain.  This college-level course focuses not only on the “meaning” of reading selections but also stresses “how” the meaning is achieved.  You will become aware of the devices writers use to create their effects. 

Writing assignments range from informal and reflective to formal, critical papers, with an emphasis on analytical and argumentative writing which reflects your personal voice and an excellent command of syntax and diction.  Both your writing and reading will reflect an understanding among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing. 

Writing tasks will give you the practice necessary to make you an aware, flexible writer who can compose in different modes and/or for different purposes.  In developing sophisticated reading and writing skills, you will explore and describe how language works.  You will learn to observe and analyze the words, patterns, and structures that create subtle effects of language.  You will learn to describe language, demonstrating working knowledge of parts of speech, structural patterns, awareness of connotation and shades of meaning in context.  To do this, you must develop a vocabulary for what George Gadda of University of California (Berkeley) calls "the abstractions of human experience, the words one needs in order to be precise about an author's 'tone,' attitude,' 'assumption,' or 'point of view.'"  Gadda describes the broad aims of this course as relating to student reading and writing in three areas related to the study of discourse: 1) The Purpose and Modes of Discourse; 2) The Development of Discourse; 3) The Language of Discourse.  A student who can do all this should be able to score least a three on the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition examination.

This course assumes that you already understand and use Standard English grammar.  The intense concentration on language use in this course will enhance your ability to use grammatical conventions both appropriately and with sophistication as well as to develop stylistic maturity in your prose.  As in the equitable college course, Advanced Placement English Language and Composition expects you to be a mature reader and rhetorically sophisticated writer.  Because this course is designed to imitate a college-level course, much of the homework will consist of independent reading with class discussions and activities during the school day.

This link to AP Central’s explanation about Advanced Placement Language and Composition is useful for extra information about the upcoming test, ways to study, extra questions, etc.  (This link opens a new window.):  http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/sub_englang/html

Students enrolled in this course are expected to take the College Board AP English Language and Composition examination in May of 2007.  Thus, in addition to earning two credits (one for successful completion of each semester) toward your English graduation requirements at Hartland High School, you also have the opportunity to earn up to a year’s credit of college Composition, should you earn a qualifying score on the exam.  Also, successful students will emerge from this course with enhanced critical thinking skills, an enriched vocabulary, and the confidence to write effectively for college courses and for professional and personal lives.

This link to AP Central’s explanation about the Advanced Placement Language and Composition exam is useful for extra information about the upcoming test, ways to study, extra questions, etc.  (This link opens a new window.):  http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/ap/about.html

Purpose and Modes of Discourse:

As writers, students will:

• employ a variety of rhetorical structures appropriate for various purposes and audiences;
• subordinate parts to an effective whole and create appropriate transitions between them;
• adopt the conventions of the appropriate discipline or discourse community when writing for a particular audience.

As readers, students will:

• identify the purpose and modes of discourse and explain their relationship to rhetorical structure;
• explain how the parts of discourse are related to each other and to the whole;
• recognize the conventions of different genres and historical periods, and identify the assumptions authors have made about their audiences.

The Development of Discourse:

As writers students will:

• gather information and ideas, discover patterns, and develop their sense of purpose;
• select and arrange information and ideas effectively for given purposes and modes of discourse;
• communicate ideas and experiences to an intellectually sophisticated audience.

As readers students will:

• recognize main ideas and purposes and explain inferences about an author's intentions;
• evaluate the connections between ideas at different levels of generality, including the adequacy of evidence;
• evaluate the value and validity of the writer's message in relation to its historical, social, or cultural context.

The Language of Discourse:

As writers students will:

• shape language in a variety of rhetorical patterns so that sentence structure, diction, and figures of speech serve purpose, audience, and strategy;
• explain how one's choices of language produce intended effects.

As readers students will:

• discern and describe in an appropriate vocabulary how the arrangement of language creates a voice;
• identify major devices that control tone and structure; show how they serve rhetorical purposes.

Both the reading and the writing tasks will help you gain textual power, making you more alert to an author's purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone.  By the late spring of the school year, you will have completed a course in effective writing and critical reading.  The writing skills that you learn to appreciate through close and continued analysis of a wide variety of prose texts will serve you in your own writing as you grow increasingly aware of these skills and their pertinent uses.  During the course, a wide variety of prose texts and writing tasks are the subject of study.

As this is an AP (college-level) course, performance expectations are high, and the workload is challenging and rewarding.  Students are expected to complete course work (reading and writing) outside of class.  Often, work involves long-term writing and reading assignments.  Effective time management is crucial and necessary.