High School English Department
Advanced Placement Language and Composition
Overview:
Advanced Placement Language and Composition, offered to juniors at Lake Braddock, is an intensive, rigorous, college-level class that prepares students to think, read, and write analytically, and to take the Advanced Placement examination in May. A score of 3, 4, or 5 on the exam may qualify a student for college credit. All students who enroll in this course must take the AP examination.
Curriculum:
The curriculum of AP Language and Composition centers on the study of both rhetoric and American literature. Like all English classes at Lake Braddock, it offers students the opportunity to develop their skills in critical and analytical thinking and writing through the careful reading of a variety of genres of literature. This class adds an intensive study of rhetoric and a greater emphasis on the analysis of works of non-fiction, particularly essays.
Literature:
Though the literature studied in AP Language and Composition varies somewhat from teacher to teacher, all classes read a wide variety of prose and poetry spanning the earliest writings of Colonial America to works published in the last several years; these works raise critical questions about our lives, our beliefs, our history, and our future. Students will study novels, poems, plays, essays, and speeches, attempting, in all of the works, to connect ideas, answer questions raised by the authors, draw conclusions, and consider how the authors manipulate language to achieve specific goals. The Advanced Placement test requires the careful reading and analysis of multiple passages; students who engage in ongoing conversations with and about the literature studied in this course will be prepared to think, respond, and write at the level demanded by the examination. Students can expect an average of 150-200 pages of reading per week.
Writing:
Writing in the AP course is primarily designed to develop and hone analytical skills, including those necessary to score well on the AP English test's three essay questions. As such, the focus of writing for the class will be on developing meaningful analysis, practicing strong organizational skills, and employing specific evidence drawn from a text to support abstract ideas. Students are expected to write with a precise vocabulary, employ rhetorical structures that bolster meaning, and to develop a mature style that expresses its author's voice in clear, concise language. Students enrolling in the AP course should be beyond working out basic mechanical flaws in their writing so that the focus in writing instruction can be on analysis and the development of rhetorical skill.
Students will write frequently in this class, using their writing to develop their ideas with more clarity, more depth, and more focus. Frequent papers of literary analysis - demanding rich understanding of what is often difficult literature - will assist students in asking questions of their reading and reaching firm conclusions about authorial purpose. Students can expect several analytical papers per quarter, as well as numerous shorter analytical responses.
Student Expectations:
As a college-level class, AP Language and Composition is not for every high school junior. It is for those students ready to participate and thrive in a challenging, college-level environment. The class exists for those students who genuinely enjoy and appreciate reading, who write thoughtfully, and speak articulately, and who desire to become thinking, questioning, life-long analysts of literature. The Lake Braddock AP English program expects its students to have the motivation and the discipline required to comprehend, analyze, and interpret college-level literature.
AP Language and Composition students must be willing to challenge themselves - to challenge their assumptions about literature, to challenge their "initial" or "first" readings of a text, and to challenge themselves to read everything with an alert eye to the subtleties, power, and possibility of novels, poems, memoirs, and essays. Perhaps most importantly, AP Language and Composition students must be open to new ideas and interpretations of what they are reading, and be willing to share new insights and opinions with their classmates.
AP Language and Composition students should expect a heavy load of difficult work. They should expect to devote significant time to out-of-class reading and writing. In the first semester, it is not unusual to read 200 pages of a novel, draft a short paper, spend a class period discussing a difficult essay and another class period engaged in careful analysis of one or two passages of a text - all in one week. During the second semester, students should, in addition, expect an average of one or two timed writings per week in preparation for the AP examination.
As is characteristic of college courses, the AP Language and Composition course focuses students less on frequent objectives tests and quizzes and more on in-depth analyses of difficult reading. As such, individual writing assignments carry more weight than they might in another English course. Knowing they will be assessed on a college grading system, and how heavy the reading and writing load tends to be, students with heavy course loads (especially those with other AP courses) and/or many extra-curricular activities should realize the serious, long-term commitment they are making when they enroll in this class.
Summer Reading:
Every student enrolled in Advanced Placement Language and Composition must complete a summer reading assignment. These assignments are available from AP teachers Dirk Schulze and Mary Kelsch in the Lake Braddock English department. In addition, they will be available in the informational meeting on April 18, 2005. Over the summer, the guidance department of LBSS will have copies of the assignment.
Summary:
For qualified, responsible, dedicated, and talented students, the Advanced Placement Language and Composition course at Lake Braddock offers both a formidable challenge and, hopefully, an enriching, lively, and rigorous academic environment. The standards in this class are extremely high, as are the potential rewards. Those students who dedicate themselves to it will leave the class with a greater appreciation for their own analytical abilities, a foundation in rhetorical study, a literary eye more alert to style and language, and a more mature writing style of their own. In addition, students successful in AP Language and Composition tend to be successful in AP Literature and Composition, taken as seniors at Lake Braddock. Students with individual questions about the program can contact English Department Chair Sandy Baney or AP Language and Composition teachers Anne Partlow and Evonne Jones for more information.