Literacy+in+English

UC Requirements for English ELL's can only have one year of ELD, the other three have to be regular English courses

http://www.scoe.net/castandards/agenda/2010/ela_ccs_recommendations.pdf How do the CA Common Core standards work? Do they do 1/2 in 9th and 1/2 in 10th or all in both?

2 periods 9th grade 1 period 10th-12th + 1 period Foreign Language (Spanish, French, Mandarin?)

Focus on receiving and interpreting messages from the world (print/nonprint (media literacy/arts), fiction/nonfiction, advertising, news, current/historical, all topics and fields)

Focus on creating and presenting messages to the world (print/nonprint (media literacy/arts), fiction/nonfiction, self-->other)

From: ACT Success Report

The study of English is the study of text, whether written, spoken, or heard. The rigor of an English course can, in many ways, be gauged by the sophistication of the texts students read and the type of writing they are required to produce.
 * ELA Course Content**

Many of the assigned texts in the courses studied were typical of books and novels read by high school students. Indeed, they were probably encountered in high school for the first time by readers of this report. That old standby Julius Caesar was taught in five of the twelve Grade 10 courses surveyed; The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies were taught in two of the twelve Grade 10 courses surveyed; and The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn, Macbeth, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and The Scarlet Letter each appeared more than once on Grade 11 syllabi. All of these works were listed as some of the most frequently taught book-length works by Arthur Applebee in his seminal 1993 study, Literature in the Secondary School: Studies of Curriculum and Instruction in the United States. Four texts not mentioned in Applebee’s study, but increasingly appearing in high school English courses—A Raisin in the Sun, A Lesson Before Dying, Black Boy, and Fahrenheit 451—were also frequently mentioned on the English syllabi studied.

In addition to these commonly assigned texts, the courses in the study featured works by authors that do not typically show up on high school reading lists and are unusually sophisticated for the grade level of the students. In Grade 10 courses, we found students reading Pirandello, Achebe, Malamud, Nabokov, Plato, Walker, and Shelley. One non-honors Grade 10 class members of the study team observed was ending the school year by reading Heart of Darkness.

Grade 11 course syllabi listed works by the playwright August Wilson and the novelists Toni Morrison and Chinua Achebe, Dante’s Inferno, The Screwtape Letters, The Grand Inquisitor, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Paradise Lost, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and works by Borges, Lorca, Frye, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Hwang, Solzhenitsyn, and García Márquez.

The average number of full-length texts read in a year was seven. In one Grade 11 class, students were asked to read 14 full-length works as well as 12 essays. In a Grade 10 class, students read 32 short stories in addition to 4 full-length texts. Most of the teachers (83%) reported that they used textbooks of anthologized materials, but all of them supplemented with additional materials, particularly novels. Said one teacher: “I find most textbooks are limited in enrichment, so I use many different sources to enrich the topics I teach. The sources I use vary depending on my own reading, and what I think students need, when they need it.”

Clearly, not only do these courses require students to read a lot, they continually challenge students to stretch their abilities with increasingly complex texts. One teacher said that in the college-oriented courses, the “pace is a little quicker, the material is certainly more abundant, and at times a little more challenging” than in other courses.


 * The importance of writing**

All of the interviewed English teachers said they emphasized writing in their classes. According to the study’s other methods of data collection, 62% of the English teachers reported giving writing assignments of one page or less at least weekly; 83% said they required students to complete a writing assignment of two or more pages at least monthly. Some national organizations, notably the Southern Regional Education Board, recommend more writing in high school courses (Southern Regional Education Board, 2004). Nonetheless, the courses in this study assigned slightly more writing than other surveys indicate is probably typical. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows, for example, that 67% of 12th graders report having to write essays to “analyze or interpret something” at least once a month (U.S. Department of Education, 2002).

One teacher attributed the school’s success in English to a required onesemester course that focused entirely on writing. Teachers in a different school described how they worked collegially in their department to make sure that all aspects of grammar and modes of writing were covered over the students’ four years in high school.

The importance of writing as an assessment tool was also clear. In addition to short answer or multiple-choice tests, a full 97% of the English teachers reported using essays frequently to assess student performance.


 * Language of the discipline**

These teachers asked students to use the language of the academic discipline—the student of English literature was trained to speak like a literary critic, and the developing writer, to think and write the way a professional writer does. Nearly three quarters of the English teachers cited the importance of using literary terms correctly. One teacher called such terminology “the coin of the realm. We cannot speak in here unless we have the same language.”

The courses introduced students to the language of rhetorical analysis as well as the language and concepts of literary theory. A few featured other kinds of conceptual language, such as the language of philosophy. Going well beyond the basics of “plot,” “symbol,” or “parallelism,” students in these courses learned to marshal such terms as “ethos,” “pathos,” and “logos” and to discuss existentialism, for example.


 * Making connections**

The teachers made explicit connections between topics being taught and previously read texts, real-world situations and events, other topics, and the students’ own lives. The evidence of these connections found in the materials was reinforced by the teachers themselves in the interviews.

Teachers used analogies, cited examples, and told stories in order to help advance students’ understanding. One teacher helped her students understand the African rites of initiation in the novel The Dark Child by relating it to coming-of-age rituals in her students’ own lives, such as a prom or bar mitzvah. Another used The Lion King to help students analyze “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Some teachers drew examples from books read earlier in the year, from other academic disciplines, popular culture, and the newspaper. In this way, teachers gave their students many entry points into the content.


 * 10th Grade is world lit?**

Although in Grade 10 students should always be expanding their metacognitive awareness of their own reading strategies and adding to those strategies, the reading portion of the course **should move beyond helping students comprehend sophisticated material of various genres** (9th grade focus?) and requiring students to complete close and careful readings of such works.

Students should also be learning the language of literary theory. Students should be introduced to a variety of ways of looking at literature, such as extrinsic critical approaches (biographical, historical, postmodernist), intrinsic critical approaches (narratological, new critical, or rhetorical), as well as critical approaches culled from other fields (sociological, Marxist, feminist, psychological, cultural studies). To this end, a teacher might lecture on Freud and Jung, then help students use some basic psychological ideas (archetype, persona) in analyzing a film or short story.

Over the course of the year, students should be introduced to many critical theories; they should develop the ability to explain and defend their interpretations of works, whether in front of the class, in small groups, or individually in critical papers. In one class, for example, students were reading The Great Gatsby through a Marxist lens; later, the same class might look at the Fitzgerald novel using a feminist critique.

//From a great example of a 10th grade syllabus, see report:// "In this full-year English class you will be reading literature including short stories, poetry, plays, autobiographies, and novels written in different time periods and from different countries. It is my hope that as you read and analyze the literature you will be clarifying your own beliefs and values. Class discussion is an integral part of our class, and I will do everything I can to make sure that all voices are heard in a supportive and encouraging environment."

Suggested texts for a college-preparatory Grade 10 English course

The list offered here is only suggestive. It is not intended to be prescriptive or all-inclusive. It provides examples of the works that were being read in the college-preparatory Grade 10 English courses studied.

Poetry by Author Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Countee Cullen, Kool Moe Dee, Rita Dove, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mari Evans, Robert Frost, NikkiGiovanni, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, James Welden Johnson, Etheridge Knight, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda, Dudley Randall, Sonia Sanchez, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Derek Walcott, Margaret Walker, Walt Whitman, Wole Soyinka

Drama Julius Caesar, Fences, The Glass Menagerie, The Piano Lesson, Romeo and Juliet, A Raisin in the Sun, Cyrano de Bergerac, Pygmalion, The Oresteia, Our Town, Macbeth

Movies and Videos The Natural; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; Arsenic and Old Lace; The Glass Menagerie; Roots

Epics The Odyssey, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali

Nonfiction, Memoirs, Essays, Letters Banneker—“Letter to Thomas Jefferson” Bigelow—“A Primer of Existentialism Carson—The Sea Around Us Douglass—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Eckert—“Initiatory Motifs in the Story of Telemachus” Hurston—Dust Tracks on a Road King—“Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Stride Toward Freedom Mack—“The Modernity of Julius Caesar” Nabokov—“Good Readers and Good Writers” Orwell—“Politics and the English Language,” “Shooting an Elephant” Plato—Euthyphro Poe—“The Philosophy of Composition” Rodriguez—Hunger of Memory Stegner—“The Town Dump” Thoreau—Walden Walker—“In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” Washington—Up From Slaver Malcolm X—Autobiography Wiesel—Night

Fiction Black Boy, A Lesson Before Dying, The Catcher in the Rye, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The Great Gatsby, The Bluest Eye, TheScarlet Letter, The Dark Child, Fahrenheit 451, When Rain Clouds Gather, The Wrestling Match, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, The House on Mango Street, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1984, Brave New World, The Bean Trees, Let the Circle Be Unbroken, The Old Man and the Sea, Heart of Darkness

Short Fiction by Author Chinua Achebe, Paula Gunn Allen, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Pearl Buck, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Eugenia Collier, Anita Desai, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Lucy Honig, Ha Jin, Charles Johnson, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Bernard Malamud, Katherine Mansfield, Bobbie Ann Mason, Gabriel García Márquez, James Alan McPherson, Herman Melville, Susan Minot, Tim O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’ Connor, Tillie Olsen, Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allan Poe, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Richard Wright

The Grade 11 course is often a more highly interdisciplinary course than the Grade 10 course: the higher-level course has a focus on history and the language of philosophy and rhetoric, as well as on continuing to teach students how to read literature through a theoretical lens.
 * 11th Grade**

In terms of reading and literature, the focus in many Grade 11 English courses and textbooks is on American literature and its history; in studying American literature, then, Grade 11 students should learn to recognize the significance of a given context for the meaning of a literary work.

In other words, students in a college-preparatory Grade 11 English course should be provided with more than simply a knowledge of the chronological placement of literature and literary movements in history; they should understand the ways that the texts they read were influenced by and influenced the history of their times, the ways that writers of different genres influenced each other’s work, and how these different kinds of literature are part of a conversation about what kind of a country America might be.

But not all Grade 11 English courses are focused on American literature and American history, and there are other skills and understandings related to the reading of literature that are important for students to acquire at Grade 11. As the Grade 10 students were learning how to use a variety of theoretical lenses through which to view the works they study, students in Grade 11 should be studying dominant philosophical and religious ideas upon which the works they read rest.

Thus, students will be continuing to learn how to analyze great writing using the works of theorists such as Saussure, Frye, Bloom, Lacan, or Iser, and they will also be reading in phenomenology, philosophy, and aesthetics. For example, students might read Aristotle’s Poetics and write an essay on the subject of aesthetic values throughout history; they might compare modern ideas about tragedy, character, and drama to those of Aristotle. Students should learn the philosophies connected to the literature they read, as well: when they read The Scarlet Letter students should learn about the underpinnings of Puritan thought; when they read Siddhartha students should read Huston Smith or Mark Epstein on Buddhist philosophy; when they read Emerson and Thoreau students should learn how those writers used and contributed to the theories of Transcendentalism.

Grade 11 students should be doing a considerable amount of reading outside of class, on their own. Students should read at least 300 pages a quarter, from a teacher-approved book list—of essays, autobiographies, works by political and science writers, by biographers and history writers, as well as fiction—making an appointment to talk to their teacher about the book they’ve read when they are ready. The teacher will enter the book or books read in each student’s reading log; this log will be part of the student’s grade.

Suggested texts for a college-preparatory Grade 11 English course:

The list offered here is only suggestive. It is not intended to be prescriptive or all-inclusive. It provides examples of the works that were being read in the college-preparatory Grade 11 English courses we studied.

Drama Macbeth, The Piano Lesson, Blood Wedding, A Raisin in the Sun, Othello, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Fences, Arms and the Man, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Three Theban Plays, Desire under the Elms, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, The Importance of Being Earnest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Waiting for Godot, No Exit, Equus, Hamlet, M. Butterfly

Nonfiction, Memoirs, Essays The Souls of Black Folk, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Maus, Stride Toward Freedom, Walden, Aristotle’s Poetics, The Birth of Tragedy, Anatomy of Criticism, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Dust Tracks on a Road

Essays by recent writers such as Baldwin, Berger, Camus, Dillard, Hurston, Kozol, Moody, Orwell, Paglia, Rodriguez, Sontag, Steinhem, Steele, Vargos Llosa, and West; essays by writers of the past such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Disraeli, Engels, Arnold, and Pater

Fiction Sula; Song of Solomon; Gulliver’s Travels; The Screwtape Letters; Jubilee; Frankenstein; Bless Me, Ultima; Krik? Krak!; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch; Madame Bovary; The Waiting Years; The Hour of the Star; Nervous Condition; Heart of Darkness; Things Fall Apart; One Hundred Years of Solitude; The Grand Inquisitor; The Chosen; The Metamorphosis; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Quicksand; Brave New World; Siddhartha; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Awakening; Wise Blood; Middle Passage; Dreaming in Cuban

Movies The Seventh Seal, Citizen Kane, Rashomon, Apocalypse Now

American Classics Their Eyes Were Watching God, Black Boy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Invisible Man, The Grapes of Wrath, Cane, The House of Mirth, My Antonia, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Billy Budd, The Red Badge of Courage, Leaves of Grass, The Great Gatsby, Ethan Frome

Important American Documents William Faulkner’s “Nobel Prize Lecture,” John F. Kennedy’s “Inaugural Address,” Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” The Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and “Gettysburg Address,” Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

Poetry The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Inferno, Beowulf

Short Fiction by Author Chinua Achebe, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Pearl Buck, Jorge Luis Borges, Albert Camus, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Eugenia Collier, Anita Desai, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Ha Jin, Charles Johnson, James Joyce, Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Mansfield, Bobbie Ann Mason, Gabriel García Márquez, James Alan McPherson, Herman Melville, Susan Minot, Tim O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Flannery O’ Connor, Tillie Olsen, Luigi Pirandello, Edgar Allan Poe, J. D. Salinger, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Richard Wright