Building Skills for Success

In this course, you’ll develop the essential skills you need to succeed in academic and daily life.

You’ll learn to:

Analyze and understand complex literary texts from around the world
Create your own texts in a variety of forms, including oral, written, and media presentations
Think critically and creatively to solve problems and express your ideas
Communicate effectively and clearly in writing and speaking
Use language with precision and style to engage your audience

Through a range of challenging and engaging activities, you’ll develop your skills in reading, writing, and communication, and prepare yourself for success in university, college, or the workforce.

Prerequisite: English Grade 10 (Academic)

Unit 1: Writing

This unit introduces students to the fundamentals of writing, including the writing process, and strategies for future writing tasks. Students will learn about sentence and paragraph structures, outlining their essays, formulating a thesis statement, and the structure of comparison and critical analysis essays.

Unit 2: Persuasion

The unit introduces students to language analysis and helps them become informed and contributing citizens by developing analytical skills to recognize and understand the tools of argument and persuasion, as well as persuasion skills, including the ability to analyze and integrate evidence appropriate to their audience.

Unit 3: Poetry and Short Stories

In this unit, students will explore and understand how imaginative literature reflects the social and historical values of a given time period; understand how poets use language to give both meaning and pleasure to the reader, and learn to perform close readings and analysis of imaginative literature that broadens their understanding of the world around them.

Unit 4: Drama

In this unit, students will explore a variety of texts exploring the nature of humans and their inner conflicts through an analysis of tragedy texts. Students will read and familiarize themselves with Aristotle’s formula for developing tragedy and will participate in an evaluation of their chosen text.

Unit 5: Novel Study

This unit will take students through an intensive reading session of classic dystopian fiction, after that students will report their learning with assigned questions that call for analysis and references. Students will discuss their thoughts on the dystopian aspects of the literature with their peers and culminate their reading in a final assignment.

Unit 6: Media Studies

This unit introduces students to the fundamentals of media conventions, production, and analysis. Students will explore the principle concepts of media studies and observe and discuss how bias can be detected in regular media productions.