Expository Reading & Writing Curriculum
The goal of Expository Reading and Writing Course is to prepare college-bound seniors for the literacy demands of higher education. Through a sequence of fourteen rigorous instructional modules, students in a yearlong, rhetoric-based course develop advanced proficiencies in expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing. The cornerstone of the course-the assignment template-offers a process for helping students read, comprehend, and respond to non-fiction and literacy texts. Modules also provide students research methods and documentation conventions. Students are expected to increase their awareness of the rhetorical strategies employed by authors and to apply those strategies in their own writing. They read closely to examine the relationship between an author’s argument or theme and his or her audience and purpose, to analyze the impact of structural and rhetorical strategies, and to examine the social, political, and philosophical assumptions that underlie the text. By the end of the course, students will be expected to use this process independently when reading unfamiliar texts and writing in response to them. Course texts include contemporary essays, newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, reports, biographies, memos, assorted public documents, other non-fiction texts. The course materials also include modules on two full-length works (one novel and one work of non-fiction). Written assessments and holistic scoring guides conclude each unit.
Course # 11130
Course Term: Yearlong
Grade Levels: 12
Graduation Credit: English
CSU/UC: English (b)