Grade 12 ELA

Grade 12 ELA includes a wide range of quality texts that engage students in analysis of autobiographical nonfiction, speeches, poetry, drama, and fiction. Classic and contemporary voices including Malcolm X with Alex Haley, Leslie Marmon Silko, Henry David Thoreau, Benazir Bhutto, Jared Diamond, William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Nikolai Gogol. Through the study of a variety of text types and media, students build knowledge, analyze ideas, delineate arguments, and develop writing, collaboration, and communication skills.

1 - Personal Narratives

"All of our experiences fuse into our personality..."

Module 12.1 includes a shared focus on text analysis and narrative writing. Students read, discuss, and analyze two nonfiction personal narratives, focusing on how the authors use structure, style, and content to craft narratives that develop complex experiences, ideas, and descriptions of individuals. Module 12.1 is comprised of three units. In the first two units, students explore two types of personal narrative writing: an autobiography and a personal narrative essay. As students prepare to draft, revise, and edit their own narrative essays in the third unit of this module, these rich texts provide students with opportunities to analyze how the authors effectively incorporate elements of narrative writing. Module 12.1 is comprised of three units:

Unit 1: "All of our experiences fuse into our personality..."

Text: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

Unit 2: “Remember the stories, the stories will help you be strong”

Text: “Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit” by Leslie Marmon Silko

Unit 3: Crafting a Personal Narrative Essay

Text: None. (Writing Unit)

2 - Fight the Power

“I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”

In this unit, students read Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, a dramatic account of Julius Caesar’s assassination and its aftermath. Students build upon key understandings from 12.2.1 as they analyze how Shakespeare introduces and develops central ideas over the course of the play. In their analysis of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” students delineated Thoreau’s complex claims about the ways in which ethics, or conscience, informs an individual’s relationship to the state. In their analysis of Julius Caesar, students continue to explore the how the central idea of ethics, in relation to Roman ideals of honor, interacts with the central idea of the relationship between the individual and the state. Additionally, students continue to engage with the central idea of exercise of power, an idea threaded throughout their analysis of Bhutto’s speech and Thoreau’s essay, as well as with the new central idea of social bonds. Module 10.3 is comprised of three units:

Unit 1: “[A] free and enlightened state.”

Text: “Ideas Live on” by Benazir Bhutto
Text: “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau

Unit 2: “Th'abuse of greatness is when it disjoins / remorse from power.”

Text: The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

3 - The Inquiry and Writing Process

Researching Multiple Perspectives to Develop a Position

In Module 12.3, students engage in an inquiry-based, iterative research process that serves as the basis of a culminating research-based argument paper. First, students read closely excerpts of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, which explores the ultimate causes for resource and wealth inequity across the globe. The text serves as a springboard to research, as students surface and track potential research issues that emerge from the text. In 12.3.2, students engage in the writing process with the goal of articulating and supporting their evidence-based research perspective. The end product is a final draft of a research-based argument paper that synthesizes and supports several claims using relevant and sufficient evidence and valid reasoning. The writing cycle, in which students self-edit, peer review, and continually revise their work, serves as the primary framework. Module 12.3 is comprised of two units:

Unit 1: Using Seed Texts as Springboards to Research

Text: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

Unit 2: Synthesizing Research and Argument Through the Writing Process

Model Resource: “Empowering Women is Smart Economics” by Ana Revenga and Sudhir Shetty
Model Resource: “Poverty Facts and Stats” by Anup Shah
Model Resource: “Evidence For Action: Gender Equality and Economic Growth” by John Ward, Bernice Lee, Simon Baptist, and Helen Jackson
Model Resource: “How Many Americans Live in Poverty?” by Pam Fessler

4 - New Beginnings

The Interaction of Central Ideas and Character

The texts in this module develop complex characters who struggle to define and shape their own identities. The characters’ struggles for identity revolve around various internal and external forces including: class, gender, politics, intersecting cultures, and family expectations. In Unit 12.4.1, students read Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, exploring how various textual elements such as character development and setting intersect and contribute to the development of the central ideas of power dynamics, nostalgia, and identity. Additionally, students view excerpts from Elia Kazan’s 1950 film, “The Case for Universal Basic Education for the World’s Poorest Boys and Girls” by Gene B. Sperling, analyzing how the film interprets the play. Later in the unit, students read the poem “A Daily Joy to Be Alive” by Jimmy Santiago Baca and consider how the central ideas in the poem relate to A Streetcar Named Desire. Module 12.4 is comprised of two units:

Unit 1: “I’m going to do something. Get hold of myself and make myself a new life!”

Text: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Text: “A Daily Joy to Be Alive” by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Unit 2: “The reader should realize himself that it could not have happened otherwise...”

Text: “The Overcoat” from The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Nikolai Gogol
Text: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Online Writing Lab

This page contains resources for writing a research paper and other academic writing, including comprehensive details about MLA, APA and Chicago Manual of Style citation and format styles. This page also contains sample papers, slide presentations, and posters.

ELA Resources

Additional resouices for the study of English Language Arts include:

CCSS Appendix A - Research Supporting Key Elements of the ELA Standards

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