English IV Honors

Course Overview

In Honors English IV, students deepen an understanding of writing and rhetorical arguments through careful reading, analysis, and writing as they explore the rhetorical situation, claims and evidence, reasoning, organization, and style. Students must work independently, connect the works studied, and lead the class. Revision is considered an essential component of all writing. Students will complete narrative essays, expository essays, research papers, and creative essays/writing. The course will emphasize the study of rhetoric, thematic analysis, and sophisticated style. Students will explore the following themes: the nature of humanity, the nature of society, and the nature of our ethical responsibilities. The following question is the overarching premise the course explores: “What do the characters (or authors) within the works discover about themselves, the nature of humanity and its societies, and their individual or collective responsibilities?” Outside reading books are encouraged and may be assigned. Please note: The course is designed to prepare students to write research papers, continue developing reading and analytical skills, and build other English Language Arts skills needed for college and career readiness.

About Our Curriculum

The curriculum for each English course is continually reviewed and revised to ensure every student receives an engaging, rigorous learning experience aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts and Literacy.

Course teams meet regularly to review student learning and make informed adjustments to curriculum and instruction to meet their students' unique needs and strengths. While teachers collaborate to establish shared learning experiences with core content, essential skills, and common outcomes within each course, we also intentionally preserve flexibility for teachers to tailor select texts, assignments, and learning experiences and to adjust unit sequencing or instructional approaches as appropriate.

For this reason, the unit overviews on this site represent the course's shared learning goals and experiences; specific texts, assignments, and sequencing may vary by teacher and class section. Please check your teacher's Schoology page regularly for the most current information about your student's class, including upcoming novel and media selections.

Thank you!

Ms. Crystal Laliberte, MA, CAGS
English Curriculum Coordinator, Grades 6–12

Rhetoric & the Human Experience

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how accomplished writers respond to complex rhetorical situations through purposeful choices about audience, purpose, context, exigence, speaker, and form.
Evaluate how an argument's structure, line of reasoning, evidence, rhetorical appeals, and stylistic choices contribute to its clarity, persuasiveness, and effectiveness.
Analyze how diction, syntax, tone, voice, and rhetorical patterns shape meaning, reveal perspective, and influence an audience.
Examine how writers use personal experience, research, observation, and reflection to develop larger claims about identity, ethics, society, and the human experience.
Evaluate and synthesize arguments and perspectives from contemporary, scholarly, and other complex sources, attending to assumptions, reasoning, evidence, credibility, and areas of uncertainty.
Craft and refine rhetorical, argumentative, and narrative writing with deliberate control of structure, evidence, style, voice, and audience.

Essential Questions

How do humans use language and storytelling to make meaning of their experiences?
How do individual experiences and identities shape the stories we tell and the arguments we make?
How do writers use rhetoric to explore, define, or challenge ideas about what it means to be human?
How do audience, purpose, context, and perspective shape the ways we communicate what we believe to be true or important?
How can personal experience illuminate larger questions about identity, ethics, society, and the human condition?
How can rhetoric create connection across different experiences while preserving the complexity of individual perspectives?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Independently read and analyze complex nonfiction representing a range of perspectives and disciplines, including contemporary essays, journalism, scholarly writing, and peer-reviewed articles by academics, authors, researchers, and other expert voices.
Examine how writers working in different disciplines and publications construct arguments, establish credibility, engage evidence, and respond to particular audiences and rhetorical situations.
Closely analyze how reasoning, evidence, diction, syntax, tone, voice, structure, and rhetorical strategies work together to create persuasive or intellectual impact.
Consider how personal experience and individual identity intersect with broader cultural, ethical, philosophical, scholarly, and social conversations.
Produce analytical, argumentative, and narrative writing in both timed and extended settings, adapting a range of rhetorical choices to the task, purpose, audience, and context.
Revise for cohesion, word choice, and syntactic control to achieve a distinctive academic or personal voice development for rhetorical effectiveness.

In Pursuit of Truth(s): Research & Inquiry

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Generate substantive research questions and independently narrow, broaden, or redirect inquiry as new evidence complicates their understanding.
Conduct advanced research using university-accessed academic databases and other authoritative sources to locate relevant scholarly and peer-reviewed research.
Evaluate sources for authority, methodology, credibility, relevance, perspective, limitations, and usefulness within a specific line of inquiry.
Synthesize ideas, evidence, and competing perspectives across scholarly and other credible sources to develop an original, nuanced understanding of a complex question.
Develop precise, knowledgeable claims, distinguish them from alternative or opposing claims, and sustain a logical argument using relevant and sufficient evidence.
Produce polished research-based writing that integrates sources selectively, maintains an independent analytical voice, and demonstrates academic conventions, ethical source use, and appropriate citation.

Essential Questions

Why do humans pursue knowledge, and how does inquiry shape our understanding of ourselves and the world?
How do we determine what is true when evidence, experiences, and perspectives complicate one another?
How can research deepen, challenge, or transform our beliefs about human experience and the questions that connect us?
How do we reconcile individual experience and perspective with evidence that points toward broader or competing understandings?
How can engaging seriously with other perspectives refine our own ideas about identity, society, ethics, and human purpose?
How can inquiry move us beyond what we already believe toward more nuanced understandings of ourselves, others, and the human condition?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Pursue a sustained, increasingly independent investigation of a complex literary, cultural, philosophical, ethical, or social question.
Learn to navigate university-accessed research databases to locate scholarly and peer-reviewed articles from academics and researchers across relevant disciplines.
Read across contemporary, scholarly, and peer-reviewed sources, evaluating how disciplinary perspectives, evidence, methodology, and publication context shape knowledge and argument.
Trace patterns, tensions, contradictions, and competing perspectives across sources, using new evidence to refine questions, reconsider assumptions, and develop increasingly nuanced conclusions.
Synthesize primary and secondary evidence into an original argument that maintains the student's analytical voice while engaging meaningfully with scholarly conversations and relevant alternative perspectives.
Complete a formal research process involving inquiry, advanced source evaluation, evidence analysis, planning, drafting, feedback, substantive revision, editing, and appropriate academic citation.

Ambition, Choice & Consequence

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Independently analyze complex literature using strong and thorough textual evidence, including determining where a text deliberately leaves motives, meanings, or outcomes uncertain.
Trace two or more themes, such as ambition, free will, fate, responsibility, knowledge, power, and consequence, and analyze how they interact to produce a complex account of human experience.
Analyze the impact of an author's choices regarding characterization, structure, point of view, imagery, symbolism, diction, allusion, and relationships among literary elements.
Examine how writers reinterpret foundational philosophical, mythological, religious, historical, or cultural ideas to develop new arguments about human nature and responsibility.
Evaluate critical interpretations of literature and consider how historical, psychological, sociological, gender-based, or other lenses shape meaning.
Construct nuanced literary arguments that advance precise interpretations, address complexity or ambiguity, and integrate primary and relevant secondary evidence.

Essential Questions

What controls our fate, and where does individual choice begin?
What defines personal responsibility?
How can ambition function as both a source of human achievement and destruction?
To what extent are individuals accountable for the consequences of what they create, choose, or pursue?
How do foundational ideas about knowledge, creation, morality, or power continue to shape literature?
How can competing interpretations deepen our understanding of a complex text?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Place literary works in conversation with philosophical, mythological, religious, historical, or nonfiction texts, such as Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" or the myth of Prometheus.
Trace interacting themes and analyze how structure, characterization, symbolism, imagery, allusion, point of view, and ambiguity contribute to complex meaning.
Engage with literary criticism or other interpretive lenses to test, complicate, and revise their own readings.
Participate in evidence-rich Socratic discussions that require students to probe reasoning, engage competing interpretations, and reconsider conclusions when warranted.
Develop sustained literary analysis through close reading, arguable thesis development, purposeful evidence selection, drafting, feedback, and substantive revision.

Dystopia: Freedom, Power & Society

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how complex dystopian and speculative literature examines tensions among freedom, security, social responsibility, institutional power, conformity, and resistance.
Trace how multiple themes interact through characters, conflicts, settings, institutions, technologies, and systems of control.
Analyze how structural, stylistic, and rhetorical choices shape a work's critique of society and its representation of power.
Compare how literary, informational, visual, and multimedia texts develop competing perspectives on identity, technology, authority, conformity, freedom, and social responsibility.
Evaluate how institutions and systems both protect and constrain individuals, including the ethical tensions created when collective stability conflicts with individual autonomy.
Develop research-based interpretations that synthesize close literary analysis, credible secondary evidence, and consideration of alternative or opposing perspectives.

Essential Questions

How do institutions gain, exercise, and sometimes abuse power?
How can social systems both protect and suppress individuals?
When does social order become social control?
What responsibilities do individuals have when institutions become unjust?
How do dystopian works expose tensions between individual freedom and collective responsibility?
How can speculative literature help us evaluate assumptions about our own society?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Independently read a complex dystopian or speculative novel, such as 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, Klara and the Sun, or Lord of the Flies.
Analyze how authors construct institutions, social systems, technologies, and cultural norms that shape identity, behavior, relationships, freedom, and resistance.
Examine how interacting themes and choices in structure, point of view, characterization, symbolism, irony, imagery, and diction produce sustained social criticism.
Integrate perspectives from related nonfiction, short fiction, film, television, or other media, such as V for Vendetta, to examine similar questions across forms.
Engage in seminars and analytical writing that require students to evaluate competing interpretations, probe reasoning, and support claims with strong evidence.
Develop and revise a research-based literary or argumentative paper that advances an original claim and synthesizes primary and secondary evidence.

Lives in Context: The Human Condition

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze complex representations of human experience across texts representing varied cultures, perspectives, genres, and historical or social contexts.
Trace how identity, memory, relationships, environment, community, history, and social systems interact to shape individual lives and choices.
Analyze how authors' choices regarding characterization, conflict, setting, dialogue, structure, point of view, and language contribute to meaning and aesthetic impact.
Evaluate tensions between individual agency and the larger cultural, economic, social, or familial forces that shape opportunity and belonging.
Examine how loyalty, responsibility, community, and identity can function simultaneously as sources of meaning, obligation, conflict, and constraint.
Develop comparative interpretations that synthesize evidence across texts and perspectives to illuminate larger questions about the human condition.

Essential Questions

How do literature and art deepen our understanding of lives different from our own?
To what extent are individuals shaped by their circumstances, and to what extent can they transcend them?
How do history, culture, family, and community shape identity?
What do individuals gain and sacrifice through loyalty and belonging?
How do social structures influence agency, opportunity, success, and happiness?
What can contrasting representations of human experience reveal that a single perspective cannot?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Independently read and analyze complex literature representing varied identities, communities, cultures, and complex experiences, both teacher- and self-selected, such as but not limited to: Exit West, Sweat, Beartown, The Bluest Eye, Pride and Prejudice, or The Namesake.
Examine how individual lives are shaped by the interaction of personal history, relationships, community expectations, economic circumstances, and broader social forces.
Analyze how literary craft produces nuanced representations of identity, agency, belonging, responsibility, opportunity, and conflict.
Compare texts across genres, perspectives, cultures, or media to identify meaningful similarities, tensions, and competing understandings of human experience.
Develop interpretations that acknowledge ambiguity and complexity rather than reducing characters or social questions to simple explanations.
Communicate a clear and distinct perspective through analytical writing, discussion, or formal presentation, using evidence and reasoning appropriate to audience and purpose.

The Search for Meaning: Existence, Identity & Truth

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze sophisticated literary and philosophical explorations of meaning, suffering, authenticity, freedom, fate, responsibility, identity, reality, truth, duty, and honor.
Trace how multiple philosophical ideas interact and build on one another to produce complex or even contradictory accounts of human existence.
Analyze how structure, imagery, symbolism, diction, tone, figurative language, rhetoric, and syntax contribute to philosophical meaning and aesthetic impact.
Examine tensions such as fate and free will, action and inaction, authenticity and conformity, duty and desire, and certainty and ambiguity.
Compare how literature, philosophy, film, music, visual art, and other forms construct different responses to enduring questions of human existence.
Develop original interpretations supported by strong and thorough evidence while recognizing ambiguity, paradox, uncertainty, and legitimate competing meanings.

Essential Questions

What gives human life meaning?
What does it mean to live authentically?
To what extent are individuals governed by fate, circumstance, or choice?
How do people create purpose in the face of suffering, uncertainty, or absurdity?
What responsibilities accompany freedom, duty, and moral choice?
What can literature and philosophy reveal about identity, reality, and truth?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Independently read complex literary, philosophical, and nonfiction works addressing questions of meaning and existence, such as Man's Search for Meaning and Hamlet.
Analyze how writers and characters wrestle with suffering, uncertainty, authenticity, fate, freedom, responsibility, duty, honor, identity, and truth.
Closely examine significant literary and philosophical passages, such as soliloquies, essays, and arguments, for the interaction among language, structure, perspective, and ideas.
Compare competing interpretations of existential questions across literature, philosophy, film, music, visual art, or other media, such as Life is Beautiful, Stranger Than Fiction, and adaptations of Hamlet.
Engage in discussion and writing that require students to probe assumptions, reconcile or sustain contradictions, and consider what remains unresolved.
Produce analytical or creative work that advances an original interpretation and demonstrates deliberate choices in form, evidence, style, audience, and purpose.

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