STUDENTS: Why we do summer reading (besides ensuring we cover all material necessary for next year and beyond)… What Research Says About Reading:
The following points are from Reading In and Out of Schools, a publication prepared by the Educational Testing Service for the U.S. Department of Education, and Patterns of Reading Practice, a publication of The Institute for Academic Excellence.
- The amount of reading that students do for school and do out of school are both positively related to their reading achievement.
- Students who reported discussing their reading had higher average reading achievement than students who reported never having this opportunity,
- When ranked according to the amount of reading they do, students in the top 5 percent read 144 times more that students in the bottom 5 percent.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace.
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).
Part Two: Course Description (Required)
It is also required that students heading into A.P. English Language and Composition read and note major takeaways about the curriculum of this course by accessing the Course Guide for this subject. To do so, go to apcentral.collegeboard.org, scroll over “Exam Home Pages,” click A.P.
English Language and Composition, and then click “Course Description.” Or you may follow the URL below to get to the A.P. English Lang. and Comp. Course Description.