Course Descriptions

English IV is British literature and composition, which means we will be reading texts ranging from Anglo-Saxon works to contemporary British writers. This year we will be reading selections from Beowulf and Canterbury Tales as well as Hamlet, Animal Farm or 1984. We will also read several short stories, poems, and informational texts from different eras in British history. There will also be a variety of required oral and written assignments to develop skills in argumentation, research, analysis, and communication. We will cover all of these assignments in depth as the year progresses.

AP English Language and Composition course cultivates the reading and writing skills that students need for college success and for intellectually responsible civic engagement. The course guides students in becoming curious, critical, and responsive readers of diverse texts, and becoming flexible, reflective writers of texts addressed to diverse audiences for diverse purposes. The reading and writing students do in the course should deepen and expand their understanding of how written language functions rhetorically: to communicate writers’ intentions and elicit readers’ responses in particular situations. The course cultivates the rhetorical understanding and use of written language by directing students’ attention to writer/reader interactions in their reading and writing of various formal and informal genres (e.g., memos, letters, advertisements, political satires, personal narratives, scientific arguments, cultural critiques, research reports).

Reading and writing activities in the course also deepen students’ knowledge and control of formal conventions of written language (e.g., vocabulary, diction, syntax, spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, genre). The course helps students understand that formal conventions of the English language in its many written and spoken dialects are historically, culturally, and socially produced; that the use of these conventions may intentionally or unintentionally contribute to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a piece of writing in a particular rhetorical context; and that a particular set of language conventions defines Standard Written English, the preferred dialect for academic discourse (AP CollegeBoard Course Overview). In AP Language and Composition we will dealing a variety of texts with a focus on American Literature.