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Nonfiction at Heart: AP English Language
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by Bernard Phelan
Barrington Community High School
Barrington, Illinois
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| | The Difference Is Language
As participation in the AP English Language and Composition Exam continues to grow -- last year more than 156,000 exams were given -- the need grows for clarity about the AP English Language and Composition course. How might new teachers best prepare themselves for teaching it? How might teachers in the profession make the changeover from teaching imaginative literature to working with nonfiction? While there are many answers to these questions, one thing is certain: teaching nonfiction reading and writing is at the heart of an AP English Language and Composition course.
One of the first tasks, in many ways the most difficult, is assembling a curriculum, which for most teachers means choosing texts that will become the subject and substance of the course. A language and composition course works differently from a literature course. Unless a teacher reads abundant nonfiction as a matter of course, there is some initial perplexity. What texts do I choose? The material available is almost infinite, so my suggestion is to look at various "Readers" to find a best collection of essays for your purposes. Searching the Teachers' Resources area on AP Central will provide you with reviews and information about a wide variety of possible texts. You'll find that many outstanding anthologies exist, such as the Bedford or Norton readers. Other readers, such as The Conscious Reader, include imaginative literature as a supplement to their nonfiction focus. Still others feature sections on debate and argument, the relationship of reading and writing, the fallacies of logic, style issues, modes of discourse, rhetoric, annotation in reading, and drafting and editing in writing. All of these issues are important to a language and composition teacher, but what are the practical essentials for someone beginning an AP English Language and Composition course? The commitment to teach nonfiction is primary. In focusing on nonfiction, it's important to emphasize rhetoric, style, and argument.
At the end of this article, I'll list some essays I have had success with, meaning that students were able to understand certain key concepts I wanted them to understand and demonstrate that understanding in both impromptu and take-home writing assignments. The essays chosen for this course need to be vastly varied by time period, geographical location, race, gender, and ethnicity. The exam encourages this attention to diversity in its choice of passages for both the multiple-choice and essay sections. Female writers; African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American writers; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers -- all are presented as part of the universe of nonfiction writers. Students need to experience diversity in the course.
Whatever the selection being studied at a given time, students should become aware of the rhetoric, style, and argument of the piece. It is tempting to choose particular essays to stress one of these three qualities, and this is fine as long as you understand that any essay can be approached in all three ways and that students will benefit from the multiplicity of approaches.
Focus on the Rhetorical Triangle
Take, for example, the selection "On Seeing England for the First Time," from the 1999 AP English Language and Composition Exam. The exam asked for a rhetorical analysis of the Kincaid piece. This should signal to students that big-picture issues are the matter for discussion. What is the author's intention? What prompts her to write the piece? Who is her audience? What does the writer want the audience to do? Is she credible? How do I know this? What feelings does she appeal to? How is my self-interest tapped? What is her argument? While these questions provide more than enough stimulus for a student to write for 40 minutes, they do not preclude other questions and approaches. A style analysis, for example, would take a look at the schemes and tropes used in the service of the author's larger rhetorical purposes. In this piece Kincaid uses anaphora, antithesis, metaphor, simile, and many other figures and syntactic manipulations. One could also take the question about the structure of her argument and expand that to a full analysis of her argument about the oppressiveness and invasiveness of colonialism and its eradication of those unfortunate enough to be the subjects of the colonial power.
Teachers accustomed to teaching literature can see that there are many points of correspondence to literary analysis. Still, there are differences. The intentional fallacy is nonexistent. We can and need to discern, textually and contextually, an author's intent. The affective fallacy falls by the wayside. How we respond to a piece of writing does matter. In short, those of us who grew up as English majors trained in the methodology of the "new criticism" need to shift our perspective to that of the rhetorical triangle in which reader, writer, and text have a complex and multifaceted reciprocal relationship. It's not enough to pull out an old anthology and extract from it a few token pieces of nonfiction.
An AP English Language and Composition course needs to feature nonfiction and have, perhaps, some works from fiction and poetry as a supplement. At the same time, rhetoric, style, and argument and their abundant permutations become differing modes of approach to a text, all of them valid and best when combined. At the basis of any of these approaches, though, is the rhetorical triangle -- language and text are finally relationships, people talking to and responding to each other through the medium of text. The rhetorical triangle lies at the heart of the AP English Language and Composition course and gives guidance and suggestion as to how we might talk about nonfiction with our students.
Bernard Phelan is an AP teacher in the Chicago suburbs, and serves as an AP Table Leader and an SAT II Reader. Bernie served on the test committee for the SAT II for six years, and is currently on the writing committee for the new SAT. He also contributed to the making of the English Language APCD. Bernie consults for the College Board and teaches at AP Summer Institutes in Chicago and serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the College Board.
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