High School Language Arts Adoption
Language Arts 9-11 Approved Instructional Materials
Ninth Grade Introduction to Literature and Composition
This course is the students’ “launching pad” to high school. The core and core choice texts should reflect the themes of identity and self-discovery. Works will also be chosen that lend themselves to an analysis of the elements of literature. Classical and contemporary college-bound works will be included, and the core choice list should reflect a variety of reading levels and cultures, as well as a variety of themes.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
Before We Were Free, Julia Alvarez
Black Boy, Richard Wright
Bride Price, Buchi Emecheta
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon
Dreams of Trespass, Fatima Mernissi
Ellen Foster, Kay Gibbons
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
Feed, M. T. Anderson
Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
Life of Pi, Yann Martel
Luna, Julie Anne Peters
Night, Elie Wiesel
The Odyssey, Homer
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
Ramayana, R.K. Narayan
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff
When Elephants Dance, Tess Uriza Holthe
Tenth Grade: World Literature and Composition
Tenth grade selections will reflect a mostly non-Western, geographical emphasis. Classical and contemporary college-bound works will be included, and the core choice list should reflect a variety of reading levels and cultures, as well as a variety of themes.
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Antigone, Sophocles
The Book Thief, Markus Zusak
Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Color of Water, James McBride
The Dark Child, Camara Laye
Fountain and Tomb, Naguib Mahfouz
Haroun and Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Master Harold and the Boys, Athol Fugard
Maus, Art Spiegelman
Mother to Mother, Sindiwe Magona
Nectar in a Sieve, Kamala Markandaya
Othello, William Shakespeare
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
The Sound of Waves, Yukio Mishima
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Eleventh Grade American Literature and Composition
Eleventh grade core and core choice texts should reflect a variety of multicultural perspectives. Some ties to historical chronology/historical context should be possible. Major themes for this grade level are the different interpretations of the American experience and the American dream. Classical and contemporary college-bound works will be included, and the core choice list should reflect a variety of reading levels and cultures, as well as a variety of themes.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Bone, Fae Myenne Ng
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie
Love Medicine, Lousie Erdrich
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
Native Son, Richard Wright
The Piano Lesson, August Wilson
The Rain God, Arturo Islas
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
Walden, Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
Twelfth Grade: Comparative Literature and Composition
Note: 12th grade is not a graduation requirement. The list of suggested titles below have been reviewed and recommended by the Language Arts Materials Adoption should Language Arts 12 become a graduation requirement.
These texts should be chosen for a high level of complexity. The texts should lend themselves to comparative analysis, across genres or themes or within genres or themes. Classical and contemporary college-bound works will be included, and the core choice list should reflect a variety of reading levels and cultures, as well as a variety of themes.
1984, George Orwell
As You Like It, William Shakespeare
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Beowulf (Seamus Heaney translation)
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fences, August Wilson
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Conner
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Stranger, Albert Camus
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys