Honors Language Arts 11

Honors students are expected to complete additional assignments throughout the course that build on the content provided. These assignments, like writing a children’s book, makes these students go above and beyond the curriculum content in creativity and application.

Semester A

English for grade 11 is an American Literature course, with units organized chronologically according to periods in literary history. As students read foundational works of literature and other historical documents written between 1600 and 1900, they’ll review and extend skills in five domains: analyzing literature, analyzing informational text, writing, speaking and listening, and language study, which includes word knowledge and grammar skills. Each module or unit begins with a lesson that provides historical context for the era and introduces themes that emerged in the literature of that era. Each lesson provides students with an opportunity to review basic analysis skills before applying those skills to works of literature or key historical documents. Lessons focused on more difficult historical documents include activities that help students comprehend the complex ideas in these works. Writing modes addressed in Semester A of this course include narrative, reflective, persuasive, and analytical modes. Assignments emphasize the use of details, evidence, and reasoning to support ideas; writing lessons include model essays that demonstrate key features of each mode. The speaking and listening lessons in Semester A cover rhetoric, the peer review or writing workshop process, and performance skills. Vocabulary development instruction is integrated into literature and informational text lessons. Each unit ends with an authentic assessment that presents students with a real-world scenario requiring some of the skills they learned in the unit.

Semester B

Semester B of Honors English 11 consists of units focused on historical eras and literary movements of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Naturalism, Imagism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Post-Modernism. Literature analysis lessons in semester B focus on the forms of literature that were most commonly written during the Twentieth Century and how the forms, styles, and techniques of that century inform literature written today. Students will also evaluate various modes and forms of language expression, including single media and multimedia messages. Writing and informational text lessons guide students through the stages of a rigorous research process and demonstrate how to evaluate, integrate, and share the information gathered during research. Students are required to share their ideas and analysis using several different modes, including oral and multimedia presentations. As in Semester A, the second semester of Honors English 11 provides additional challenging assignments aimed at preparing college-bound students for advanced work in the study of literature and language arts.

Semester A

The Rugged Americans
The Revolutionary Americans
The Romantic Americans
The Gothic Americans
The Radical Americans
The Realists and Reformers

Semester A Syllabus

Semester B

Beyond Realism
The New Poetry
The New Fiction
Under Construction
The Final Analysis
Expert Opinions

Semester B Syllabus