Santa Clara County Expository Reading and Writing Course

Welcome to the Santa Clara County Expository Reading and Writing Course Program!

The CSU Expository Reading and Writing Task Force has developed a curriculum and professional development materials for an expository reading and writing course to be offered to high school students in their junior or senior year.

The course is designed to prepare students for college-level English and it is aligned with the California English-Language Arts Content Standards. The course assignments emphasize the in-depth study of expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing. This course not only satisfies the 4th year high school "a-g" English requirement, but also will address critical reading and writing problems identified by the CSU English Placement Test Development Committee.

HIGH SCHOOL WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The four-day professional learning workshop series introduces high school English teachers to the ERWC materials and familiarizes them with the ERWC's integrated approach to rhetorical reading and writing. Workshops occur throughout the year. Aligned with the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy, the ERWC emphasizes in-depth reading and writing of expository, analytical, and argumentative texts in a variety of genres. Collaboratively developed by a group of CSU faculty, high school teachers, and high school administrators, the ERWC's rich and detailed yet adaptable resources help students develop the academic literacy skills necessary for success in college, career and community.

COURSE MATERIALS

The Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) materials consist of an assignment template - an outline of the pedagogical process that organizes and guides all course modules (curricular units). Each module takes between one and three weeks to teach (depending on students' needs and previous academic literacy experience) and is composed of a sequence of integrated reading and writing experiences, beginning with pre-reading activities, moving into reading and post-reading activities, and continuing through informal and formal writing assignments. Along the way, students learn to make predictions and ask a variety of questions about the varied texts they are reading, analyze content, identify and evaluate rhetorical structures, and appropriately use materials from the texts they read to support their own written analyses and arguments. Most course materials are available online to certified ERWC educators (those who have completed the four-day high school professional learning workshop series).

Divided into two semesters, course readings are on high interest topics that readily engage middle and high school readers. Student readings have been analyzed for text complexity (in keeping with the California standards). Across the two-semester grade 12 course, students read and produce increasingly varied and complex styles and genres, and just as their analytical reading abilities expand over time, so too do their rhetorical writing abilities, which grow in complexity across modules.

1st Semester

What's Next? Thinking About Life After High School
The Rhetoric of the Op-Ed Page: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
Racial Profiling
The Value of Life
Good Food/Bad Food
Into the Wild (Book module)

2nd Semester

Bring a Text to Class: Bridging Out-of-School and In-School Literacies
Juvenile Justice
Language, Gender, and Culture
1984 (Book module)
Brave New World (Book module)
Bullying: A Research Project

ASSIGNMENT TEMPLATE

Assignment Template.pdf

Upcoming Training

Expository Reading and Writing Course

This 24-hour workshop series is intended for English language arts teachers as an introduction to the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course (ERWC) for grade twelve and the ERWC curriculum modules for grades nine through eleven. The workshops are four days scheduled over several months, although the schedule may vary by region. Aligned with the California Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy, the course emphasizes the in-depth study of expository, analytical, and argumentative reading and writing. These rich, adaptable resources, developed by a collaborative group of CSU and high school faculty and specialists, are designed to help students develop the academic literacy skills necessary for success in college and the world of work. Approved as a “b” course satisfying the English subject requirement for UC and CSU admission, the ERWC may be adopted as a senior English course. The modules for grades nine through eleven may be integrated within existing English courses at those grades.

Teachers attending this workshop will receive:

Course materials and other professional books
Curriculum for preparing students to meet the demands of college-level classes
Strategies for helping students read and write rhetorically
An opportunity to calibrate school-level expectations with college-level expectations
Certification to teach the ERWC as a senior year course

Location:
Monterey - CSUMB at Ryan Ranch
8 Upper Ragsdale
Monterey, CA 93940

Registration Information:
http://www.calstate.edu/eap/englishcourse/