English Language Arts 9

Course Description

This ELA 9 course focuses on reading, writing, and language skills that are relevant to students' future high school and college coursework, and prepare students to be thoughtful, engaged citizens with proficiency in academic discourse. In this rigorous course, texts will take center stage in preparing students for close, critical reading, and analytical writing. Students will read from a set of core books, A Raisin in the Sun, Black Boy, American Like Me, The Things They Carried, Julius Caesar, The Odyssey, and Animal Farm, and beyond these core books individual teachers will select from an extensive list of enabling texts representing the major literary genres (drama, novel, memoir, short story, poetry) in order to develop close reading and literary analysis skills rooted in textual evidence based studies. Students will also engage with informational texts by learning to value evidence, read complex text closely, use investigative research, and engage in collaborative text-dependent discussions while developing independent critical thinking and analysis skills. Students will produce a range of expository, narrative, poetic, and argumentative writing compositions with a focus on strengthening foundational language skills through more analytical writing that utilizes a variety of complex syntax and semantics.