This course focuses on building effective professional and personal communication skills. Students will practice, prepare, and deliver program-specific written documents, presentations, and interpersonal communication scenarios for diverse audiences. The course also examines the importance of community and engagement, and includes best practices in ComputerMediated Communication.

In English I students build active reading skills, analyze literature and informational texts, and develop listening and writing skills. Students use texts of high complexity while integrating language arts study in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language for college and career preparation and readiness.

In English II, students learn how the human experience-real life-is the foundation of the best stories, plays, poems, films, and articles. In each unit of the course, students explore a specific aspect of the human experience such as laughter, obstacles, betrayal, fear, or transformation. Through the study of literature, nonfiction, and life, students explore what it means to be human, what it means to be fulfilled, triumphant, empowered, and transformed. As in life, students have many choices in the English II course. They choose the order in which they complete the units. Students also choose some of the works they read and have countless choices when it comes to demonstrating what they have learned. Whether reading a poem or a novel, writing a story or an analysis, or studying a Shakespearean tragedy or a modern suspense film, students explore what it means to be human, a subject on which they are already experts!

In English III, the writing and insights of authors throughout our history are collected in the fast-paced pages of The Virtual Times. Students gain an appreciation of American literature and the ways it reflects the times in which it was written. They discover how people thought and lived and wrote about their experiences. Students are also asked to observe, investigate, and report on stories of today. The goal is for students to be thorough, accurate, and compelling in their writing.

Why do people do what they do? English IV you will give you a front row seat to study of the motives that have driven people's actions for centuries. Along the way you will encounter epic heroes defying danger, tormented minds succumbing to the power of greed and ambition, enlightened thinkers striving for individual rights and freedoms, sensitive souls attempting to capture human emotion, and determined debaters taking a stand on critical issues. You will read to analyze the way language is used to express human motivation and research to examine the results of actions in the real world. The lessons in each module will give you the tools you need to gain insights from what you read and to use your knowledge in creative and analytical writing.