by Kathryn Walker

Advanced Placement courses do not always connect smoothly into curricular mapping plans, particularly in the case of the English curriculum.Opinions about the very construct of English courses vary; while some schools place little emphasis on the progression or emphasis of secondary English classes, many English teachers sense a strong necessity for students to study specific literary cultures, such as British, American, and World Literature, at specific grade levels. My sentiments align with those of this persuasion. While courses and their order vary within curricula, for students to experience these core cultures and histories of literature is essential to a broad literary perspective, which high-achieving students, those who may opt to major in English in college, certainly need.

The Advanced Placement Literature and Composition exam is relatively adaptable to any literary emphasis, but the Language and Composition course blends less readily.Instead of focusing on fiction and poetry, as most English strands do, the Language course centers on non-fiction texts, the development of various expository styles, and the analysis of written and spoken rhetoric. One of the College Board's course audit stipulations is that "the course requires nonfiction readings ...that are selected to give students opportunities to identify and explain an author's use of rhetorical strategies and techniques. If fiction and poetry are also assigned, their main purpose should be to help students understand how various effects are achieved by writers' linguistic and rhetorical choices."

In our school, AP Language and Composition is a junior-level course, when British Literature is taught in the standard classrooms. A devotee of British Lit myself, I struggled with the thought of these top students missing out on an entire culture of influential works and styles. The thought of teaching an entire course around non-fiction texts was similarly frightening to me, since few students find essays as enthralling as novels or poetry.

So I asked myself: is it possible to provide a successful course in Language and Composition, but to do so through the structure of British Literature? I browsed the sample syllabi on the College Board's website, but none of them took such an approach. Regardless, I purposed to try. I composed a brief reading list of the major eras and texts of British Literature that would engage my students. As a military school teacher, I have an all-male audience, and Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters would likely not be the most appreciated choices.I narrowed my central texts to the following list: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, Gulliver's Travels, Hard Times, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.Numerous poems, essays, short stories, and essays would supplement these larger works as well.The linguistic and historical development of British Literature makes a chronological approach advantageous, so I determined to group the works according to time order if possible, as is traditional.

To establish a theory for my course, I consulted the College Board's description of skills the students ought to acquire.The first and most central guideline is: "The course requires expository, analytical, and argumentative writing assignments that are based on readings representing a wide variety of prose styles and genres." My task was to create a clear connection between the themes of British Literature and these goals. To start, I began considering how various expository modes correspond to the types of works characteristics of eras.

The Narrative

Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and Canterbury Tales have a very clear connection: each is a narrative poem. Certainly, then, the narrative mode could play a central part in the curriculum.The amount of time that thorough readings and discussions of these works would consume naturally forms the time required in an academic quarter or so. Thus, Quarter 1 became a unit on the narrative. While the narrative is not one of the specified forms for the Language and Composition course, it formed an excellent foundation to begin the discussion of rhetoric, style, and structure. We read and discussed each poem in depth, exploring rhetorical terms that pertained to the narrative as we progressed.For the major paper of the quarter, students composed their own narrative: a Chaucerian-style retelling of any tale they chose. Within it, they demonstrated their understanding of rhetorical terms by implementing various devices, like alliteration, asyndeton, and litotes, and footnoting them to explain their functions.

The students mastered the art of the narrative both as readers and constructors of tales while getting a thorough introduction to Old and Middle English. They enhanced their understanding of linguistic changes by reciting portions of Beowulf and Canterbury in the original dialects, giving presentations on interlace structure in the stories, and watching the film Beckett for background on Canterbury. We explored the art of storytelling a bit beyond Britain by listening to a recording of Bill Cosby's To Russell My Brother, Whom I Have Slept With, discussing Twain's "How to Tell a Story," and analyzing the point of view of Mark Helprin's "A Brilliant Idea and His Own." Comparing the voices and tactics of these stories to those of classic English poets wove a colorful tapestry for examination.

The Analytical Essay

The Renaissance and Restoration periods posed a greater challenge: to what expository mode do Shakespeare and Swift best lend themselves? Analytical writing would certainly be a key component of the course, and Shakespeare's soliloquies and Swift's political satire line up as key participants. We continued the study of rhetoric, and focused more directly on the analysis of style, using Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as a guide. The students chose a soliloquy of interest to them in Hamlet, and moved line by line scrutinizing the word placement, tone, and diction of the speaker. Their analytical essays honed in on the subtleties of Shakespeare's poetry, which caused them to consider carefully their own wording choices. Next, they read Gulliver's Travels, making note of Swift's satire and its effects on them as readers. Matters of perspective, irony, and understatement became central, and students wrote a satire of their own imitating Swift's technique. As they studied Romantic poetry, they also contrasted the spontaneity of that era with the calculated prose rhetoric of the Restoration period.

The Argumentative Essay

Formal practice in argumentation is a necessity for the course, so Quarter 3 inadvertently lent itself to that challenge. The struggles of the Victorian Era provided numerous topics for debate: Utilitarianism, the Industrial Revolution, and Darwinism evoked insightful responses from the pens of Arnold, Newman, and Dickens. We read Hard Times (the shortest Dickens novel) as an introduction to Utilitarianism, examining it in light of essays by John Stuart Mill and John Henry Newman. Ruskin's defense of irregularity in art made a good companion for the poetry of this age as well. With A Rulebook for Arguments on hand for consultation and a quick refresher on rhetorical fallacies, students wrote an argumentative research paper on a pressing topic of this era: liberal v. utilitarian education, the benefits or drawbacks of industrialism, or the relation between beauty and irregularity in art. We concluded the quarter with The Importance of Being Earnest for a laugh and a look at the power of comedy to make social arguments.

The Expository Essay

As Quarter 4 began and the AP exam loomed ahead, we brought the year to a close by examining the rhetorical process. The goal of this quarter was for students to describe the subtle relations and distinctions between thinking, speaking, and writing. The 20^th century of British Literature provided the ideal outlet: Joyce, Woolf, and T.S. Eliot's expressions of consciousness and Orwell's examination of language and thought formed an excellent foundation for discussion. We debated in detail the relationship between thinking, speaking, and writing, and the role that the rhetorical process has on all three. We took time in this unit to study a variety of speeches, which are common on the exam, and looked a little beyond Britain to address the great orations of various time periods and nations. The students crafted a speech of their own, in which they used the subtleties of language they had cultivated to affect the consciousness of their audience. They delivered a final address to their classmates as the ultimate expression of their rhetorical abilities.

After composing a syllabus to this effect, I held my breath as the College Board made a decision about its validity. A quick positive response brought relief and confidence. Alternative approaches like this one to the Language and Composition course are, it seems, quite welcome at AP Central. As I have taught the course according to this model for the first time this year, however, the final test remains to see how adroitly my students will perform on the actual exam. Will their AP scores prove this version of the course to be effective? Their essays and practice tests thus far lead me to believe so, but, with all AP instructors, I anxiously await the truly definitive decision: the May exam, and the July scores to follow it. If success comes as I expect, my students will have the advantage not only of a thorough understanding of rhetoric and expository modes and the college credits that accompany that knowledge, but also of familiarity with the English language, British history and culture, and authors and works of universal significance. With a year of study in this framework complete, my question about the success of this approach has received a very positive response, and the process of asking and finding it has been a rewarding one.

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