High School - ELA

The English Language Arts (ELA) high school curriculum seeks to develop thinking and language together through interactive learning. This includes helping students develop oral language and literacy through appropriately challenging learning. The ELA curriculum draws on literature from many genres, time periods, and cultures, featuring words that reflect our common literary heritage. The curriculum emphasizes writing as an essential way to develop, clarify, and communicate ideas in persuasive, expository, narrative, and expressive discourse. It provides for literacy in all forms of media and provides explicit skill instruction in reading and writing. In addition, the curriculum teaches the strategies necessary for acquiring academic knowledge, achieving common academic standards, and attaining independence in learning. It builds on the language, experiences, and interests that students bring to school. Writing in the curriculum focuses on developing students’ distinctive writing or speaking voice. While encouraging respect for differences in home backgrounds, the curriculum nurtures students’ sense of their common ground as present and future American citizens in order to prepare them for responsible participation in our schools and in civic life.

Specific texts in the 10th grade ELA curriculum include, but are not limited to:

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• The Crucible by Arthur Miller
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Additional 10th Grade ELA Requirements

• All 10th grade students complete an informative research paper as part of their English Language Arts requirement.
• In the spring of their 10th grade year, students are assessed for three (3) days with the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) for English Language Arts.

Specific texts in the 12th grade ELA curriculum include, but are not limited to:

• Beowulf translation by Seamus Heaney
• Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Othello by William Shakespeare
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
• A Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill

Additional 12th Grade ELA Offerings:

• Advanced Placement (AP) English Literature and Composition. Students that successfully complete the course and receive a qualifying score on the AP English Literature and Composition Exam receive three college credits for the course at most universities and colleges.

English 101 (A Mount Wachusett Community College Course offered at Fitchburg High School during the traditional school day). Students that successfully meet the requirements of this course earn college three college credits.