A.P. English Language and Composition

English Language and Composition           

Introduction

An AP course in English Language and Composition engages students in becoming skilled readers of prose written in a variety of periods, disciplines, and rhetorical contexts, and in becoming skilled writers who compose for a variety of purposes.  Both their writing and their reading should make students aware of the interactions among a writer’s purposes, audience expectations, and subjects as well as the way generic conventions and the resources of language contribute to effectiveness in writing.

Goals

The goals of an AP English Language and Composition course are diverse because the college composition course is one of the most varied in the curriculum. The college course provides students with opportunities to write about a variety of subjects and to demonstrate an awareness of audience and purpose. But the overarching objective in most first-year writing courses is to enable students to write effectively and confidently in their college courses across the curriculum and in their professional and personal lives. Therefore, most composition courses emphasize the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing that forms the basis of academic and professional communication, as well as the personal and reflective writing that fosters the development of writing facility in any context. In addition, most composition courses teach students that the expository, analytical, and argumentative writing they must do in college is based on reading, not solely on personal experience and observation. Composition courses, therefore, teach students to read primary and secondary sources carefully, to synthesize material from these texts in their own compositions, and to cite sources using conventions recommended by professional organizations such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), the University of Chicago Press (The Chicago Manual of Style), and the American Psychological Association (APA).

The AP English Language and Composition course follows this emphasis. As in the college course, its purpose is to enable students to read complex texts with understanding and to write prose of sufficient richness and complexity to communicate effectively with mature readers. An AP English Language and Composition course should help students move beyond such programmatic responses as the five-paragraph essay that provides an introduction with a thesis and three reasons, body paragraphs on each reason, and a conclusion that restates the thesis. Although such formulaic approaches may provide minimal organization, they often encourage unnecessary repetition and fail to engage the reader. Students should be encouraged to place their emphasis on content, purpose, and audience and to allow this focus to guide the organization of their writing.

Upon completing the AP English Language and Composition course, then, 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.

Representative Authors

Students will be reading from a variety of writers from Ancient Greek philosophers to 20^th century essayists, with an emphasis on American Literature.

THE EXAM

Yearly, the AP English Language Development Committee prepares a three-hour exam that gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the skills and abilities previously described. The AP English Language and Composition Exam employs multiple-choice questions to test the students’ skills in analyzing the rhetoric of prose passages. Students are also asked to write several essays that demonstrate the skills they have learned in the course. Although the skills tested in the exam remain essentially the same, there may be some variation in format of the essay questions from year to year. The essay section is scored by college and AP English teachers using standardized procedures.

Ordinarily, the exam consists of 60 minutes for multiple-choice questions followed by 120 minutes for essay questions. Performance on the essay section of the exam counts for 55 percent of the total grade; performance on the multiple-choice section, 45 percent.  Examples of authors on which some recent multiple choice questions are based are William Hazlitt, Ralph Ellison, Barbara Tuchman, Shirley Abbott, and Samuel Florman.

Changes to the AP English Language and

Composition Exam

Beginning in May 2007, the AP English Language and Composition Exam will contain a new type of essay question and multiple-choice questions about the use of documentation and citation skills.

Essay Question Changes

Beginning in May 2007, the prompt and stimulus for one of the three mandatory essay questions will highlight synthesis skills. Students will read a number of related sources and respond to a prompt that requires them to cite a certain number of the sources in support of an argument or analysis. There will be an additional 15-minute reading period to accommodate the added reading. The total number of essay questions will still be three, and there will still be 40 minutes of writing time allotted for each question.

Multiple-Choice Changes

Beginning in May 2007, some questions in the multiple-choice section will refer to documentation and citation of sources. While students will not be required to have memorized any particular styles (for example, MLA, Chicago, APA, etc.), they will be responsible for gleaning information from citations that may follow any one of these (or other) styles. At least one of the passages in the multiple choice section will be from a published work (book, journal, periodical, etc.) that includes footnotes or a bibliography; the documentation questions will be based on these passages. The total number of multiple-choice questions will not change.

(Source: College Board, 2006)

Novels for 2009-2010

These books are tentatively scheduled for the school year 2009-2010 A.P. English Language and Composition course.  I recommend that students buy their own copies, if possible.  This will enable the student to annotate the novels - an important element of studying and close reading for language and usage.

Go to the 2009 Summer Assignment link under Resources for the full list and information about the summer reading assignment.

Click on the Booklist Categories for more information.

Some books will definitely be covered over the course of first and second semester:

• The Scarlet Letter
• Billy Budd, Sailor
• The Great Gatsby
  

This year, the AP Language students will be using the curriculum from The Great Books. Thus, some novels will be left to see how we are progressing:

• Candide
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
• The Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• The Awakening
  
• Light in August
• Invisible Man

Pride and Prejudice Study Guide (pdf file)

The Fountainhead Essay (doc file)
General information about the essay and copies of the prompts.

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	doc file: You need the Microsoft Word program, a free Microsoft Word viewer, or a program that can import Word files in order to view this file. To learn more about the free Microsoft Word Viewer, visit the Microsoft Word website.

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