Overview
Pre-AP English 1 focuses on the reading, writing, and language skills that have immediate relevance for students and that will be essential for their future coursework.
Texts take center stage in the Pre-AP English 1 classroom, inspiring and preparing all students for close, critical reading and analytical writing. The course trains the reader to observe the small details in a text to arrive at a deeper understanding of the whole. It also trains the writer to focus on crafting complex sentences, building this foundational skill en route to more sophisticated, longer-form analyses.
Areas of Focus
The Pre-AP English areas of focus are practices that students develop and leverage as they engage with content. These areas of focus are vertically aligned to the practices embedded in other English courses in high school, including AP, and in college, giving students multiple opportunities to strengthen and deepen their work with these skills throughout their educational career. These areas of focus help to identify and prioritize the practices that are so fundamental to the study of English that they occur consistently throughout the full course of study.
Pre-AP English Areas of Focus:
- Reading closely: Students read closely and analyze a range of complex literary and informational texts.
- Valuing evidence: Students value textual evidence and incorporate it effectively in writing and speaking.
- Noticing language choices: Students understand how writers and speakers use specific words and sentences to move the thoughts, emotions, and actions of readers and listeners.
Course at a Glance
The tables below show the English 1 course organized by four units of study.
Underlying Unit Foundations
These big ideas are integrated across all units:
- Engaging with texts
- Constructing texts
- Focusing on language
- Investigating through research
- Entering the conversation
Underlying Unit Foundations
Genre Focus: Short stories and visual texts
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Focus Skills
- Critical reading of short fiction and visual images
- Analyzing how authors use specific details to convey meaning
- Writing complex sentences and analytical paragraphs
Performance task: Analyzing telling details in a one-paragraph analysis of short fiction
Genre Focus: Poetry and drama
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Focus Skills
- Critical reading of poetry and drama
- Analyzing authors’ stylistic choices
- Writing analytical sentences and multi-paragraph analyses
Performance task: Analyzing pivotal words and phrases in a multi-paragraph analysis of a poem or drama excerpt
Genre Focus: Essays and arguments
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Focus Skills
- Critical reading of nonfiction essays and arguments
- Analyzing rhetorical features and making comparisons across texts
- Writing analytical sentences and essays
Performance task: Analyzing an argument in a written essay
Genre Focus: Openings of novels
Timeframe: 7 weeks
Focus Skills
- Critical reading of literary texts
- Analyzing narrative perspectives, characterization, and setting
- Writing a literary analysis
Performance task: Writing a literary analysis essay
Instructional Resources
Schools that officially implement a Pre-AP course will receive access to instructional resources for each unit. These resources don’t constitute a full day-by-day curriculum. Instead, they provide support for teachers as they design instruction for each unit.
Pre-AP English 1 instructional resources include:
- A robust set of model lessons that demonstrate how to translate the course framework, shared principles, and areas of focus into daily instruction.
- Curated texts and targeted lessons for approximately 50% of the instructional time that prioritize the analytical reading and writing skills essential for the performance tasks and future AP and college courses. Pre-AP resources that can be used alongside local school or district materials to address the objectives of the course framework.
Assessments for Learning
Each unit includes many opportunities to understand student progress and provide meaningful feedback:
- In-lesson formatives: short writing tasks in which students demonstrate understanding of a text or concept discussed in class (scored by teachers).
- 2 learning checkpoints: short online assessments in which students apply learning to texts not studied in class (automated scoring and reporting).
- 1 performance task: a written response to a text not studied in class that helps students build readiness for AP English Exams (scored by teachers, with provided scoring guidelines).
- A final exam is provided as a summative assessment that allows students to demonstrate their mastery of the skills learned throughout the course. This exam is optional.
Partnerships
Quill and College Board have partnered to provide students with meaningful practice of their sentence-level writing skills.
Visit the Quill Official Pre-AP English Practice page to view all the resources that have been custom-built for Pre-AP English.
The New Book Press and College Board have partnered to provide all Pre-AP teachers and students with access to WordPlay Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet (Pre-AP English 1) and Macbeth (Pre-AP English 2). WordPlay eBooks are internet based complete editions of Shakespeare’s plays, with filmed professional performances of each play “on the page” next to the text, together with glossaries, extra support, and integrated Pre-AP materials.
Visit the WordPlay Pre-AP page for more information and further resources.