Welcome to Accelerated English III for the 2013-2014 school year. As a high school junior, you will find
the year to be a challenging one. I hope that you will put forth your best effort in all that you do this
year. Now, what’s in store for you in English. Well, you will be reading, writing, and preparing for
standardized tests. This year there will be more emphasis on the Common Core of Standards which will
add rigor to our state curriculum. I know that you can meet the challenge of mastering these new
standards.
In reading you will follow a chronological study of literature from the United States. Reading will also
including analyzing, evaluating, and writing about informational texts related to the historical period of
the assigned literature. A basic/tentative outline follows:
Summer Reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Our Town, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Unit One: The New Land
Native American Tales, Puritan Writers and Orators, Planters
*The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter
Unit Two: A New Nation Emerges
Writers and Orators of the Revolution including Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine,
George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin
*Project: DBQ using informational text plus presentation
Unit Three: American Romanticism
William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe
Unit Four: New England Renaissance
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fireside
Poets, Emily Dickinson, and others
Unit Five: Division and Reconciliation
Walt Whitman, Spirituals, Frederick Douglass, and others
*Project: DBQ using informational text
*Essay: Analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, MLK’s letters and speeches
Unit Six: Realism, Local Color, the Frontier
Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Jack London, and others
Sidney Lanier, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters
* The Red Badge of Courage or Ethan Frome
Unit Seven: The Modern Era
Short Fiction: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Eudora
Welty, Elizabeth Enright, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor
Nonfiction: James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Carl Sandburg, E. B. White, John Dos Passos
Poetry: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Carl
Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, E.E.
Cummings, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden
Harlem Renaissance: James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Langston
Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks
Novels: *The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms
Unit Eight: Post-Modern Period / Contemporary Period
Elie Wiesel, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden, Tim O’Brien, Anna Quindlen, Bernard
Malamud, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Karl Shapiro, Richard Wright,
Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, John Updike, Anne Sexton, N. Scott Momaday, Alice Walker, Amy
Tan, James Baldwin, Sylvia Plath, James Dickey, and others
In addition to reading literature and informational texts, you will also engage in writing. Daily journals,
essays, DBQ’s, and a research paper will be completed this year.
Vocabulary and grammar will be taught in conjunction to the reading and writing. Some grammar will
be taught as separate units.
Test prep will include preparing for PSAT and ACT tests.