Reading List for Ap Language and Composition

AP Linguistic communication teachers have STRONG opinions nigh their reading lists. Get a group of the states together in a room, and we are going to function like the Ruddy Sea over whether or not nosotros should teach novels and plays in the course. I hear this line all the time: "There is no fiction on the exam, so y'all should merely stick with short nonfiction."

Poppycock.

I can only think of i scenario in which fiction should not be woven into an AP Lang syllabus: A teacher has to manage the form on a ane-semester block, and the students are weak readers and writers who are under tremendous force per unit area to made a three or above on the AP Lang test. But for kicks, allow'due south say they aren't feeding into AP Lit.

There are numerous reasons why fiction should be included on an AP English Language reading list.

AP Linguistic communication students can actually analyze rhetoric within fiction.

We typically think of rhetorical assay as a non-fiction task, but novels and plays can include speeches, letters, and even essays for students to consider.

I give y'all Marc Antony'due south Act III funeral oration from Julius Caesar. Everybody needs a trivial Marlon Brando, right?

You lot can analyze the heck out of the way Antony builds irony through repetition here:

Hither, under exit of Brutus and the rest–

For Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men–

Come I to speak in Caesar'south funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me:

Simply Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honourable man.

I give you the painful dazzler of Pecola Breedlove's mental dissent in The Bluest Eye. Students can look at the way language reflects trauma.

Fiction tin exist argument.

Ask Angie Thomas almost what she has to say on social justice in The Hate U Give. Consider Chinua Achebe's T hings Fall Apart as an argument against colonialism. Even though a book may be based on an event or a common scenario, it's all the same fiction. Even The Crucible! At least half the AP Lang teachers I know become it in because of Miller's parallels with McCarthyism.

Fiction can as well exist a jumping off place for statement. In The Catcher in the Rye, Mr. Antolini offers Holden the Wilhelm Steckel line, and nosotros could spend all day building an statement to defend, challenge, or qualify this one:

"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one."

William Steckel

Many LEAs crave American Literature be taught in the junior yr.

My country requires a survey of American Lit in English III, but there are several ways to make that work. One is to line upwards with APUSH.

Align your lessons with the AP Usa History teacher and sprinkle in non-fiction and brusque fiction for each time period. That's pretty easy with Revolutionary War letters and documents, just it gets a bit more tricky with the Romantics. Slide in the back door with one of Poe's articles. Civil War era? Get some Frederick Douglass messages in.

Dreading dragging students kicking and screaming through The Red Letter? Never fear; you can easily get the same Hawthorne stylistic elements, literary devices, and themes in with "The Minister's Black Veil."

Dying to teach Catcher in the Rye but aren't sure what to do with it? Spend time on the unreliable narrator (betoken of view is a rhetorical strategy, by the mode) and have students mimic Holden's style in a teenage rant about something that's bugging them. (I even let mine curse in their rants afterward a lesson on profanity in the novel. We come to an agreement on the no-no list—one I completely direct—and dive in.)

Fiction tin provide leverage for other courses.

Want your school's AP Lit instructor to kiss you square on the mouth? No? Yous'll at least become a processed cane in your mailbox at Christmas if you get in some novels and poesy.

When curriculum designers are deciding which skills will be designated power standards, they await at leverage; what skills will give students vertical leverage with the next course and horizontal leverage with material across content areas? Fiction can offering vertical assist for AP Lit and horizontal help with courses like AP Usa History.

What of whole-course novels and plays?

I bask experiencing a book together with a group of students. Honestly, in 30 years of teaching, I never did literature circles. There, I've confessed.

I want the whole class to find out the identity of Pearl's father together. When I teach Things Autumn Autonomously with my sophomores, I want to giggle with them well-nigh "ashy buttocks." I just do Euripides's Medea to see who is going to catch the line nearly the dry stick.

Permit information technology be known that I am NOT a fan of throwing the babe out with the bathwater when it comes to novels. If you're going to teach The Scarlet Letter, for heaven's sake teach the whole thing. I think you can get abroad with skipping Act Iv of almost Shakespearean histories, just prose is unlike. If yous're going to use it, use it. This administration-led trend of banning entire whole-class novels drives me crazy.

How to squeeze in the whole reading list

On days when y'all demand to talk over the novel, do nonfiction bong ringers but devote the bulk of the class to fiction.

Aim for shorter works that withal offer a sense of each literary period. (Think Billy Budd over Moby Dick, a Twain short story over Huck Finn, etc.)

Skip the tough texts that will crave a lot of hand holding. Invisible Homo and Light in August come to listen.

If you are in the awful position of teaching AP Language on the block, you may actually take to cut class novels. (Information technology hurts just to write it.) Nevertheless, y'all tin can still have students read independently outside of class. Students might get both shortlisted choice books and free reign within their zone of proximal evolution (not too challenging, not too easy).You can learn more about my arroyo here.

Why The Things They Carried is a MUST

Hands down, my favorite slice to teach from is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Because the book crosses over into creative nonfiction, there is a lot of room hither for rhetorical assay. The author uses his characters' experiences to contend the futility of war, so it is rife for an analysis of argumentation.

I teach the novel in chapter chunks. Within each section, we wait at the author's rhetoric, the thesis each chapter is intended to communicate, and the modes used both as frameworks and methods of development. What practice I hateful? O'Brien uses narration every bit both an overarching mode and as a way of developing micro ideas. He has whole capacity that can be described every bit description and short paragraphs embedded within narration that help to develop the theses.

We write rhetorical analysis and short pieces in each of the other modes. To read more about my arroyo to The Things They Carried, take a await at this post.

The Big Takeaways

Teach short fiction that blends well with the skills laid out in the AP Language Grade & Exam Clarification and fits the characteristics of each American literary period if a survey is required by district curriculum. As much as possible, set aside the notion that content that would never be tested should never be taught.

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Source: https://angiekratzer.com/ap-language-reading-list-fiction/

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