The AP English Language course provides students with the opportunity to read rigorous texts from various eras and in different genres, analyzing the big ideas of rhetorical situation, claims/evidence, reasoning/organization, and style. Students use given texts to reach the goal of effective writing and analysis: they will read and annotate texts from a critical perspective in order to craft well-reasoned essays and personal reflections in response. The course is structured both thematically and chronologically, based on diocese requirements and College Board’s unit guide. The overarching theme for the course is that of Power. Students will extend and explore the basic readings to work with nonfiction titles that expand on the ideas stated or implied in the required texts. Additional readings come from such varied sources as Project Gutenberg, current events, national publications, and any other resources that seems likely to provide for rigor, depth, and high interest.

The first semester will be Introduction to Academic Prose which introduces students to college-level reading, writing, and discourse analysis: it engages students in the analysis and creation of texts that reveal multiple perspectives about specific rhetorical situations and cultural issues. In addition to learning how to revise by analyzing their own writing, students will learn to edit their own work and use proper academic documentation. The second semester will be Introduction to Popular Literature which is designed to help students develop a fuller understanding of the human condition by exploring a range of accessible, bestselling fiction and non-fiction from a variety of periods and places, historic and contemporary. The course may include popular stories, songs and ballads, the scripts of blockbuster plays and films, best-selling novels, and widely distributed nonfictional prose.