AP English Language Summer Work: Home

Your Task

Reading

Our general expectation is that AP Lang students complete a minimum of 2 hours of reading per week during the school year. We want you to work up to that this summer if it's not already a habit. Part of that regular weekly reading should be at least 2 full-length non-narrative (not memoirs or biographies) nonfiction books of sufficient difficulty* for the project described to the right. This will broaden your Contextual Pool and improve your reading speed and fluency. As your situation allows, we encourage you to move beyond that, as the more you do now, the better prepared you will be for the rigors of AP English and the exam next spring.

*Note on Text Difficulty

The College Board expects that students coming into the course can read a variety of texts at the college level. Your goal this summer is to begin to bridge the gap of where your current reading comfort zone is and where we ultimately need to be by the end of the next school year. This means that you need to think beyond the easier books many of you might normally pick up for choice reading. While they absolutely have their place in a rich reading life, we have a lot of work to do to build up your reading stamina and comprehension to prepare you for the exam next spring.

Exploration

For each of the 10 weeks of summer, we would like you to engage with something and write about it in a journal log. That something is going to be a mix of things you Read, Watch, Listen to, or Experience. See the tabs at the top of this page for ideas for each.

• Read: 2 of your journal entries will be on your two  full-length texts you read this summer. Those texts will be informational nonfiction (books that explore a topic or issue, not memoirs or biographies). 
• Read: 2 of your entries will be other, shorter reading experiences. Consider Op-Eds or other journalism pieces.
• Watch: 2 of your entries will be based on something you watch, whether short form (like watching the local news) or longer (like a documentary or series). These could be more argumentative based, like your long reading texts, but they also could be informative in a variety of ways, including information about people. For this category, that's okay, since the goal in this one is to build your Contextual Pool of knowledge. 
• Listen: 2 of your entries will be listening to something, whether that's speeches or podcast episodes or something similar. 
• Experience: 2 of your entries will be writing about a cultural experience you have. Look to do things that would be new for you, that will give you new understanding of cultural references or new knowledge on something you don't know much about. We've provided ideas to help inspire you on the second tab at the top of the screen, especially if you will not/do not have the ability to travel much beyond town or are looking for free or cheap options. We encourage you to talk to your family about ways to schedule these intentionally around family plans and to consider getting together with a group of friends taking the course & doing the experience together. 

These are meant to be completed weekly (although obviously you should chip away at the two longer texts throughout the summer), not all crammed into the end of the summer! You can complete them in any order you want. ​

Critical Thinking Through Writing 

As you complete each week's engagement activity of your choice, you will fill out a one page journal log on it.  All 10 logs should be together on one Google Document. The Doc will include:

• MLA Heading at the top of the first page only:

Your Name

Mrs. Palazzo/Ms. Yellin

AP English Language

30 August 2022

• Entry Heading 
  • The name of the text/experience, with a hyperlink when applicable
  • The date you completed it
• "What I Learned"
  • A brief summary of new knowledge or perspectives on issues you've gained (1/3-1/2 page)
• "New Words"
  • Add words, terms, or phrases you were unfamiliar with that were important enough to this text/experience that it was important for you to look them up or work out their meaning through context. (Don't worry about making this section too long or if you have little or nothing to add here for some entries, especially the experiences. Add what's practical to remember throughout the year if you want to use this information in your own arguments.) 
• "Connections"
  • Anchor this new information into your growing Contextual Pool by connecting it to prior knowledge or other topics or aspects of life (1/3-1/2 page)
• Include a selfie/photos in your 2 Experiences pages