A.P.

English Language and Composition Syllabus

Contact Information:
Mrs. Jambard-Orn
Room 237
860-923-9303 x237
[email protected]
[email protected] *Gmail Account*
www.mrsjambardorn.weebly.com

Course Overview
This Advanced Language and Composition course will engage students in becoming skilled
readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts, while
simultaneously becoming skilled writers who can compose for a variety of purposes. Students
enrolled in AP English Language and Composition will develop their ability to analyze texts
through close reading of complex works from varying historical time periods as well as different
rhetorical modes. The students will begin to ask why a writer makes the choices he or she makes
and how these choices function in a given piece. Critical reading skills will enable students to
develop their abilities as writers of expository, analytical, and argumentative pieces. In addition,
students will have an opportunity to develop skills in writing personal and reflective pieces.
Overall, this course presents itself as a phenomenal opportunity for advanced high school
students to work collaboratively at a high level in preparation for college.

Strategies
The students utilize a variety of techniques while analyzing texts including SOAPSTone. This
strategy requires students to identify prior knowledge of subject and author. It also demands that
the students identify the purpose of the text, the primary audience and assumptions about the
audience. The students must also summarize the claim/central proposition/argument, describe
the tone, identify words and phrases that contribute to tone, identify an appeal or appeals to a
particular bias or experience of the audience and provide examples of words and phrases that
illustrate an appeal to a bias or experience of the audience. The students must also determine
how the content of the text develops, supports, or exemplifies the author’s primary purpose. In
addition, the students must identify rhetorical features and strategies evident in the text, evaluate
the effectiveness of the author’s evidence, and assess how well the author fulfilled his or her
purpose. The students furthermore have several opportunities to develop their close reading
skills through the “cutting” of an essay into parts in order to help them to focus more closely on
diction, structure, and rhetorical techniques. We consistently examine the relationship that exists
among purpose, audience and tone.

Discussion
The course offers many opportunities to work collaboratively. The students have opportunities
to compose a written piece as a group, and they also evaluate their classmates’ work through
small group discussions. The Advanced Placement Language and Composition curriculum is
designed to be student-centered. The students have ample opportunity in class to support,
challenge or qualify the position of the writer. Overall, discussions will lend themselves to cross-
curriculum study, with science and social studies lessons especially at the forefront.

Course Goals
Upon completing the AP English Language and Composition course […] students should be able
to:
• analyze and interpret samples of good writing, identifying and explaining an author’s use of
rhetorical strategies and techniques;
• apply effective strategies and techniques in their own writing;
• create and sustain arguments based on readings, research and/or personal experience;
• write for a variety of purposes;
• produce expository, analytical and argumentative compositions that introduce a complex
central idea and develop it with appropriate evidence drawn from primary and/or secondary
sources, cogent explanations and clear transitions;
• demonstrate understanding and mastery of standard written English as well as stylistic maturity
in their own writings;
• demonstrate understanding of the conventions of citing primary and secondary sources;
• move effectively through the stages of the writing process, with careful attention to inquiry and
research, drafting, revising, editing and review;
• write thoughtfully about their own process of composition;
• revise a work to make it suitable for a different audience;
• analyze image as text; and
• evaluate and incorporate reference documents into researched papers.

Outside Reading
Students will read 600 pages of both fiction and non-fiction outside of class in an effort to
encourage reading for pleasure. The instructor does a “book talk” interview with each student on
each book read. Outside reading counts for 10% of a student’s grade. Students are encouraged to
read within their own zones of proximal development and are required to read one full-length
work of non-fiction per quarter.

Unit 1: Style Analysis

In this unit, students learn to analyze rhetoric, specifically the tools authors use to communicate
a central argument to a particular audience.

Baseline: Students respond to the 1983 Charles Lamb prompt as a baseline writing assignment.
This challenging assignment is used for instructional planning since it highlights students’
reading and writing skills coming in to the course. Students learn with this essay to apply the
scale scores used by ETS readers. Students also respond to ten multiple choice questions released
by The College Board on a challenging passage. These assignments are for data-gathering
purposes only.

The following pieces are used for the introduction of each device. Students respond to each
passage through such strategies as Paideia seminars, SOAPS construction, annotation, one-
paragraph analyses, and multiple choice question construction. Some devices are reinforced
through video clips (e.g., a scene from “The Empire Strikes Back” to teach anastrophe). Each
device is taught in conjunction with the ones already analyzed by the students.

Tone: Emily Prager, “Our Barbies, Ourselves”

Diction: Gayle Rosenwald Smith, “The Wife-Beater” Nancy Mairs, “I am a
Cripple”
Syntax: Waldo, “Valley Forge Journal” George Carlin, “Message“ Elie Wiesel,
“September 11 essay”
Detail: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried George Orwell, “On Shooting an
Elephant” Organization: Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of
Independence”
Figurative Language: John Smith, “Letter to Queen Anne”
Imagery: Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Point of View: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye Margaret Laurence, “The Stone-Eyed
Angel” Irony: Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

After the lessons on syntax analysis, students will begin rigorous analysis of their own syntax.
Each class will begin with short, in-context editing exercises intended to address usage issues
and improve sentence fluency and complexity.

Unit 2- Modes of Discourse

This unit is student-directed and takes the form of a group project. Groups of two to three
students are responsible for researching, studying, and teaching the elements of one rhetorical
mode. The following modes are assigned to groups: cause/effect, classification and division,
comparison/contrast, description, extended definition, exemplification, process analysis, and
narration. Argumentation is dealt with separately. Each team will choose two or three essays to
use in their lesson plans, and classmates are required to read and annotate the essays and, after
the lesson on each mode, write an essay in that mode using the rhetorical devices from Unit One.
Students will choose essays from Patterns for College Writing, The Norton Reader, and The
Language of Composition. Teams will be assessed on a project rubric, and individual essays will
be evaluated based on rubrics developed by each team.

For the purposes of accuracy and accountability, students will create all lesson plans, handouts,
and essays on Google Docs so that the instructor sees all stages of the process.

Interspersed among the student lessons will be in-class timed writing, the prompts for which will
be released AP prompts. Students will also complete metacognition exercises with multiple
choice questions (e.g., defending answers to released questions or explaining correct answers to
questions they missed).
While studying rhetorical modes, students will also be analyzing works of fiction and non-fiction
from nineteenth-century American literature. This will include American Romanticism,
Transcendentalism, Civil-War Era pieces, and Realism.

Unit 3- Argumentation and Persuasion

Students will study the following topics and terminology in this unit:
● Aristotle’s logos, ethos, and pathos
● Rogerian reasoning
● Toulmin logic
● Claim, support, grounds, warrant, induction, deduction, syllogism (major premise, minor
premise, conclusion), and enthymeme
● Logical fallacies
● Charged language
● Public speaking skills

Students will study the following pieces during this unit:

● Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal” (stale text analysis of argument)
● Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address”
● Lord Chesterfield, Letter to his Son
● Patrick Henry, “Speech to the Virginia Convention”
● Political cartoons
● Clips from “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “Countdown with Keith
Olberman,” and Fox News
Students will respond to the following released AP prompts:
● Question 3, 2011 Exam
● Question 3, 2010 Form B Exam
● Question 3, 2009 Exam
The culmination of this unit will be a persuasive speech delivered to the class. Students will be
evaluated on their understanding of rhetoric, the logic of their arguments, the quality of their
evidence, and their delivery. Students will conduct formal research and write their speeches in
MLA format. This researched speech will serve as the vehicle for instruction on documentation.

Unit 4: Synthesis
Building on the persuasive research paper (in which students will be required to use a variety of
texts, including graphs and political cartoons), students will practice synthesizing, incorporating,
and citing sources given to them through both process and timed approaches. Exercises will
include annotation, multiple sorting of sources to defend various thesis statements, scoring of
released responses, and creation of their own synthesis prompt and sources.

Students will work with the following released AP prompts:

● Question 1, 2011 Exam Question 1, 2011 Form B Exam
● Question 1, 2010 Exam Question 1, 2009 Exam
● Question 1, 2009 Form B Exam
● Question 1, 2007 Exam

Additional Assignments:

Timed Writings: During the first and second marking periods, the students complete three to
four timed writing pieces taken from part 2 sections of previous Advanced Placement Language
and Composition Exams. Some of these pieces are evaluated by the instructor, and some are
evaluated by their peers. Students will meet with one another and the teacher by way of
conferencing to receive both verbal and written feedback on their essays. Students are to then
review the feedback of their work and revise their essays accordingly to be resubmitted for
additional feedback. During the third and fourth marking periods, the students complete five to
seven timed writing pieces, also taken from part 2 sections of previous Advanced Placement
Language and Composition Exams, that are evaluated using the Advanced Placement Language
and Composition Scoring Guides. Student to student and student to teacher feedback will be
provided so that students may continue to revise their work and resubmit for the opportunity to
see growth in their score based off of the Scoring Guide.The following authors are represented in
the timed writing prompts: Susan Sontag, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Igor Stravinsky, Jane
Austen, Charles Dickens, Meena Alexander, Nancy Mairs, Joan Didion, Frederick Douglass,
James Baldwin, Gary Soto, Richard Rodriguez, and Abraham Lincoln.

Additional Assessments: The students are required to submit a “vocabulary notebook” each
marking period. In the notebook, the students record words they cannot define that they have
found in newspapers, magazines, scholarly texts, textbooks, etc. The students must then define
each word; fifty words are required each marking period. These notebooks must be handwritten.
The students are also quizzed on vocabulary units found in Jerome Shostak’s Vocabulary
Workshop workbook. In addition, students take short answer and multiple choice exams on
some of the works studied.

Periodically, the students take multiple choice quizzes in which they answer questions found in
part 1 sections of previous Advanced Placement Language and Composition Exams as well as
various AP review books and materials. On occasion, I will ask the students to write part 1
questions to be answered by members of the class.

While we read and discuss various works of fiction, the students record facts, feelings and
questions in a literature journal. This journal can be used as a study guide for exams on the
novel or play being examined at the time. The journals can also be used in the writing of literary
argument pieces.

After the students read essays published in The Prose Reader, they answer the four Discovering
Rhetorical Strategies questions that follow each essay. These responses may be collected and
graded, or they may serve as the focus of the lesson on the following day.

Student Evaluation and Assessment: The students will primarily be graded using a 100 point
scale. Prior to due dates for major writing assignments, the students are able to meet with me
during their free periods, before school, and after school to proofread and edit. There are several
opportunities throughout the year for students to evaluate each other’s work using the Advanced
Placement Language and Composition scoring guides or rubrics. Often, these scoring guides and
rubrics are presented to the students prior to the assignment. Students will continue to receive
support and collect feedback during the writing process from me as well as their peers. The
students are also permitted to rewrite particular essays. Students will reference the provided
feedback on such assignments so as to revise, prepare, and submit final versions of their essays.

For each essay assignment, I post sentences and/or paragraphs from the submitted essays that
need corrections and/or improvements. In class, the students identify the error or weakness and
edit the sentence and/or paragraph. In addition, the students complete worksheets and exercises
that focus on how sentences reflect style, connotative language control, levels of diction,
figurative language, tone control, sentence structure, sentence variety and the organization of an
argument. These worksheets and exercises come from two supplementary texts: Advanced
Placement Writing 1 Strategies for Honors, Gifted and AP Students by Kathleen Dunn, Mary
Anne Kovacs, and John Manear and English Composition and Grammar Fifth Course by John E.
Warriner. For example, if sentence structure is a weakness of several submitted essays, the
weakness is addressed through worksheets and exercises as well as the editing that is done in
class.

Evaluation/Grading:
Writing Assignments/Projects/Presentations: 40% of grade
Tests: 30% of grade
Quizzes: 20% of grade
Homework/Participation: 10% of grade