Curriculum Briefing
English Language Arts 11 (ELA3011)
Course Description
This junior-year English course invites students to delve into American literature from early American
Indian voices through contemporary works. Students will engage in literary analysis and inferential
evaluation of great texts, the centerpieces of this course. While critically reading fiction, poetry,
drama, and expository nonfiction, students will master the comprehension and literary analysis
strategies that the Common Core State Standards require. Interwoven in the lessons across two
semesters are tasks that encourage students to strengthen their oral language skills and produce
creative, coherent writing. Students will read a range of short but complex texts, including works by
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Martin Luther King, Jr., F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Dave Eggers.
This course is aligned with the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts.
Units of Study
Semester A – release date: 8/1/12
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American Roots: From Native Traditions to the American Revolution
Bright Romanticism: American Individualism
Dark Romanticism: American Gothic
A Nation Divided and Expanding: Civil War, Regionalism, and Realism
Realist Novel Study: The Awakening by Kate Chopin
“Make It New”: Early Modernism
Semester B – release date: 8/1/12
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Modern Drama Study
Victory and Despair: The Roaring Twenties, Modernism, and Postwar Outlooks
“I, too, Am America”: The Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement
Cultural Rebellion: Mid Twentieth-Century Voices
Heritage and Multicultural American Identities: Contemporary Voices
Globalization and the Information Age: Postmodernism into the Twenty-First Century
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e2020 Curriculum Briefing (continued)
English Language Arts 11 – ELA3011
Course Features
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The course is organized chronologically, with a consistent unit structure. The literature within
each unit is linked by a literary movement or time period and introduced with a lesson that sets
the scene for the literature of the era.
To promote inquiry and a focus on big ideas, every lesson includes a guiding lesson question.
Students have access to the CloseReader®, a text mark-up toolset and supportive reading
environment to support the close and active reading of text. Students highlight targeted words
and phrases, annotate text with digital sticky notes, and interact with visual and audio guidance
written by experienced teachers.
Language and vocabulary skills are both woven throughout units and emphasized in stand-alone
language lessons.
Each unit includes a writing or research workshop, with appropriate balance of argumentative,
informative, and narrative writing.
The course features a range of literature, including essays, speeches, memoirs, primary-source
documents, scientific writing, novels, short stories, poems, and plays.
Students engage in a full novel study (The Awakening by Kate Chopin) and a full drama study
(Trifles by Susan Glaspell).
Multimedia resources support the development of listening skills, as students listen to audio
clips to hear the cadence of poetry read aloud, watch videos of presidential speeches, watch
brief film clips of texts they’ve read (The Scarlet Letter and Trifles), listen to audio clips to analyze
multiple interpretations of a work or subject (Trifles, poetry, songs of the Harlem Renaissance),
and create their own multimedia research project in the final unit of the course.
New! Initial Credit and Credit Recovery Versions
As part of the new 3000-series, this course has been released in an initial-credit version and a creditrecovery version. Both versions include four system-scorable essay assignments and shorter writing
and research assignments, but the initial-credit version also includes eight additional teacher-scored
essays. The initial-credit version also contains twelve additional literature pieces (one per unit) and
several additional short writing assignments. Both versions of the course offer full standards coverage
for the Common Core.
Copyright © E2020, Inc. All rights reserved.