AP English Language and Composition

Instructor: Tim Helfrich

  Curriculum Map , Class Page

This course is designed to engage students in a beginning-college level study composition. We will work to develop continued sophistication as readers and writers, with special attention to developing a broader and deeper understanding of rhetoric and how language works. Students will develop their ability to work with language and text with a greater awareness of purpose and strategy, while strengthening compositional skills. The study of short essays will provide the backbone of the course. Course readings feature a wide range of essays: expository, analytical, personal, and argumentative, from a wide variety of authors, historical contexts, and subjects.

Students should expect to write often, with an emphasis on expository, analytical, and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and professional communication. The writing assignments should help students gain textual power, making them more alert to an author’s purpose, the needs of an audience, the demands of the subject, and the resources of language: syntax, word choice, and tone.

Students will prepare for the AP English Language and Composition Exam, and may be granted advanced placement, college credit, or both as a result of satisfactory performance.

As has been this case in all of your studies at Woodlawn School, there will be a constant focus on subject integration.  Throughout the year, our studies will integrate with science, mathematics, art, Spanish, and, most often, history. You will be continually asked to consider the literature you are reading within its historical and cultural context. As well, we will approach much of the work with from the angle of a Humanities scholar (i.e. how does the work make us more humane?)

In addition to reading essays, the course reading is supplemented with imaginative literature. Because you are studying European History this year, the supplemental literature of this course will focus primarily on European literature of the 19th and 20th century. There will be a major project in each trimester that integrates History and English. 

Texts:

*The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition, Ed. Thomas Cooley

*One Hundred Great Essays, Ed. Robert Diyanni

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

The Color Of Water, James McBride

Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

The Wild Duck, Henrick Ibsen

The Grand Inquisitor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

MacBeth, William Shakespeare

1984, George Orwell

Assorted hand-outs

*these will function as the course textbooks; they are recommended by the CollegeBoard AP for use in the English Language and Composition course.