ERWC

English IV (ERWC)

GRADE: 12 / CREDITS: 5 / COLLEGE RECOMMENDED? YES

PREREQUISITES: Senior standing

The Expository Reading and Writing course (ERWC) prepares college-bound seniors for the literacy demands of higher education. Through a sequence of eight to ten rigorous instructional units, students in this yearlong, rhetoric-based course develop advanced proficiency in expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing. Teachers of this course present a scaffolded process for helping students read, comprehend, and respond to nonfiction and literary texts. Units also provide instruction in research methods and documentation conventions. Students will be expected to increase their awareness of the rhetorical strategies employed by authors and to apply those strategies to their own writing. They will 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. The ERWC is closely aligned to the seven criteria of the UC English requirements. Students successfully completing this course develop skills, knowledge, processes, and dispositions in speaking rhetorically, and habits of mind.