English

This unit covers the Oral Communication strand of English, Grade 12, University Preparation (ENG4U), from The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12: English (2007, revised). It teaches every specific expectation in the strand's three parts:

• 1. Listening to Understand (1.1 to 1.9): purpose-product-plan goals for university-style lectures, debates, information sessions and peer feedback; active listening in research interviews, Harkness discussions and sharing circles; strategies for demanding texts (background building, voice tracking, synthesis); the Toulmin model, qualifiers and the rhetorical précis; subtext, ambiguity and critical lenses; connections that complicate, intertextuality and synthesis; the rhetorical situation, kairos, structure and sound; hidden agency, loaded language, identity and power; and evaluating strategies in idea talks, debates, spoken word and documentaries.
• 2. Speaking to Communicate (2.1 to 2.7): debate speeches, oral defences, interviews and pitches; difficult questions, interest-based negotiation, feedback and virtual meetings; extended academic presentations and impromptu speaking; academic diction, hedging and devices of rhythm; speaking Shakespeare's verse and professional presence; and academic audio-visual aids (clips, citations, posters, accessibility).
• 3. Reflecting on Oral Communication Skills and Strategies (3.1 and 3.2): feedback literacy, evidence of growth, if-then goals for life after high school, and how viewing, representing, reading and writing strengthen oral communication.

Each lesson starts from what was taught in Grade 11 English (ENG3U), teaches the Grade 12 skill with worked examples, diagrams and a hands-on activity, and ends with practice at three levels and a quiz. Examples draw on Shakespeare's King Lear, Thomas King's Massey Lectures The Truth About Stories, Richard Wagamese's Medicine Walk, famous speeches and everyday Canadian situations. The skills are the ones first-year university and college students use every week (seminars, tutorials, interviews and presentations), and they connect directly to the other units of this course: Reading Literary Texts; Reading Informational and Graphic Texts; Writing: Essays and Literary Analysis; Writing: Research, Forms and Conventions; and Media Studies.

This unit covers the Reading and Literature Studies strand of ENG4U (English, Grade 12, University Preparation) as it applies to literary texts: specific expectations 1.1 to 1.8 (reading for meaning) and 2.1 to 2.3 (understanding form and style), with 3.2 and 3.3 (unfamiliar words and vocabulary) practised on Newspeak and Shakespeare's language. Its sibling unit, Reading Informational and Graphic Texts, applies the same strand to essays, non-fiction and graphic texts and covers reading fluency (3.1 to 3.3) and reflecting on reading (4.1 and 4.2) in full. Writing Essays and Literary Analysis turns this reading into essays.

ENG4U asks you to read challenging literary texts from different periods, countries and cultures, to choose some of them yourself, and to read them through critical lenses. You will read:

• Literary criticism: what critics do, the major critical lenses, and a classic of criticism, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929).
• Poetry: Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, plus the refrain of Dylan Thomas's villanelle and an original villanelle about a backyard rink.
• Short fiction: James Joyce's Araby (Ireland, 1914) and Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party (New Zealand, 1922), with Canadian and Indigenous short fiction by Sinclair Ross, Alistair MacLeod and Eden Robinson (Haisla and Heiltsuk).
• Modern drama: Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (Norway, 1879), with Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters and Michel Tremblay's Les Belles-sœurs.
• A novel study: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), compared with Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Cherie Dimaline's (Métis) The Marrow Thieves.
• Shakespearean tragedy: a complete study of King Lear in four lessons, from the love test to the play's adaptations, including a 2012 National Arts Centre production with an Indigenous cast.

The quoted texts are in the public domain in Canada and can be read free online; only short passages are quoted here, and the rest is summarized. Contemporary works, including books by First Nations, Métis and Inuit writers, are described and recommended rather than quoted.

By the end you will be able to choose texts and strategies independently, make subtle inferences, analyse how form and style create meaning, apply and combine critical lenses, and evaluate texts, criticism and productions with clear criteria: the core skills of first-year university English.

This unit covers the Reading and Literature Studies strand of ENG4U (English, Grade 12, University Preparation) as it applies to informational and graphic texts: book-length non-fiction, scholarly articles, essays, editorials, investigative features, memoirs, reports, open letters, speeches, data graphics, graphic memoirs and graphic journalism. Together with its sibling unit, Reading Literary Texts (novels, drama, poetry and short fiction), it addresses every specific expectation from 1.1 to 4.2.

• Reading for Meaning (1): designing an independent study with diverse texts and choosing strategies independently (1.1, 1.2); reading scholarly articles strategically (1.2); summary, paraphrase and the rhetorical précis (1.3); presuppositions, implications, reporting verbs and silences (1.4); synthesis and putting sources in conversation (1.5); analysing structure with says/does outlines and arrangement (1.6); evaluating reasoning (validity, hidden premises, subtler fallacies) and evidence (study design, relative and absolute risk, SIFT) (1.7); and critical literacy: framing, agency, critical lenses and a case study of Tanya Talaga's Seven Fallen Feathers (1.8).
• Understanding Form and Style (2): complex non-fiction forms, including the three classical kinds of speech (2.1); the features of research articles, data graphics and graphic pages (2.2); and sentence architecture, register and euphemism, with George Orwell's Politics and the English Language (2.3).
• Reading With Fluency (3): academic and discipline-specific vocabulary, Greek and Latin word parts, context clues and unpacking long sentences (3.1 to 3.3).
• Reflecting on Skills and Strategies (4): metacognition, think-alouds, calibration, and how other language skills and technology support reading (4.1, 4.2).

Most practice texts (essays, a news release, a letter, an article, an abstract, sources on street trees and a graphic page) were written for this site and are clearly marked as invented. Real works discussed include Seven Fallen Feathers (2017), Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech, Orwell's 1946 essay, and graphic non-fiction by Joe Sacco and Kate Beaton. The unit builds directly on Grade 11 (ENG3U) and prepares you for the reading demands of first-year university.

This unit teaches the essay-writing half of the Writing strand of Grade 12 University English (ENG4U): the literary analysis essay written through critical lenses, and the argumentative and persuasive essay, the forms you will write most often in first-year university.

Plan: read demanding task verbs (critically assess, discuss, account for) and write for an intelligent skeptic; find a problem worth writing about; map, organize and audit your content before drafting.

Claim and evidence: build theses that are arguable, specific, significant and supportable; choose, integrate and cite quotations honestly in MLA 9 style.

Literary analysis: close reading and the formalist lens with Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (1609; public domain); a toolkit of ten critical lenses (historical, feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, reader-response, postcolonial, archetypal, ecocritical and more); a full lens-based essay on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892; public domain); combining lenses, responding to critics, and principles of Indigenous-centred reading for works by First Nations, Métis and Inuit authors.

Argument and persuasion: stasis questions, burden of proof, qualified theses, evidence that is never invented, and refutation; persuasive devices, rhetorical analysis of Mark Antony's funeral speech in Julius Caesar, and the ethics of persuasion.

Craft and revise: a distinctive academic voice and precise diction; sentence craft (modifiers, subject-verb closeness, concision, rhythm); critical literacy about how your own beliefs, values and experiences shape your writing; and revising drafts, including timed essays, to criteria.

Remember from Grade 11: in the Grade 11 University English (ENG3U) unit Writing: Essays and Literary Analysis you decoded essay tasks, wrote complex theses and layered paragraphs, compared two poems, used the Toulmin model and steel-man counterarguments, and revised to criteria. Grade 12 builds on all of it with open prompts, named critical lenses, secondary sources and university-level argument. Model paragraphs and invented examples were written for this site and should not be copied into assignments.

Curriculum expectations covered: Writing 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5 and 2.1 to 2.7 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12: English, 2007 (revised), English, Grade 12, University Preparation (ENG4U), Writing strand). Research (1.3), other forms, conventions (3.1 to 3.7) and reflection (4.1 to 4.3) are taught in the sibling unit Writing: Research, Forms and Conventions.

This unit teaches the parts of the Grade 12 University English (ENG4U) Writing strand that sit around the essay: research and the independent study unit (ISU), writing in forms other than the literary essay, the conventions of polished academic English, publishing, and reflecting on yourself as a writer on the way to university. Its partner unit, Writing: Essays and Literary Analysis, teaches planning, organizing, drafting and revising essays, voice, diction, sentence craft and critical-lens arguments.

Research (Lessons 1 to 5): plan and manage a long independent inquiry and write an ISU proposal; find and read scholarly sources (peer-reviewed articles, academic books and literary criticism); evaluate sources and evidence the way university researchers do (peer review and its limits, retractions, statistics, conflicts of interest, AI-generated citations, Indigenous knowledge systems); integrate sources into your own argument with academic integrity; and use the MLA Handbook, 9th edition from the first page of a paper to the last line of the Works Cited.

Forms (Lessons 6 to 9): academic forms (the précis, the abstract and the literature review); critical reviews of books, articles and performances; applications (personal statements, scholarship essays, cover letters, résumés and professional email); and creative non-fiction and multi-genre projects.

Conventions (Lessons 10 to 13): academic vocabulary and spelling (Latin and Greek plurals, confusable words, signal verbs, abbreviations); the hard cases of punctuation (possessives, quotation endings, titles, dashes, lists); grammar for academic precision (agreement in long sentences, tense conventions, mood, modifiers, concision, hedging); and proofreading, publishing and finishing a long project.

Reflecting (Lesson 14): metacognition, interconnected skills and a Grade 12 exit portfolio that prepares you for postsecondary writing.

Remember from Grade 11: the Grade 11 University English (ENG3U) unit with the same name taught research plans and nested Boolean searching, evaluating sources for reliability, objectivity and completeness (SIFT and lateral reading), note-making and the annotated bibliography, harder MLA cases (block quotations, brackets and ellipses, poetry and drama, qtd. in, citing Elders and Knowledge Keepers), research and comparative reports, reviews and op-eds, personal essays and speeches, creative adaptations, Canadian spelling and etymology, punctuation for effect, clauses, pronoun case, active and passive voice, proofreading and a Grade 11 portfolio. This unit builds on those skills rather than repeating them. People, schools, sources and quotations in examples are invented for practice unless a real author and work are named.

Curriculum expectations covered: Writing 1.3, 2.1, 3.1 to 3.7 and 4.1 to 4.3 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12: English, 2007 (revised), English, Grade 12, University Preparation (ENG4U), Writing strand). Expectation 2.1 (form) is shared with Writing: Essays and Literary Analysis, which teaches the essay forms.

In this unit you will interpret, evaluate and create complex and challenging media texts in the platform era, where feeds are ranked by software, images can be generated in seconds and a single post can reach audiences its maker never imagined.

Understanding media texts: you will explain how platform texts are designed for five audiences, including the ranking system; read media through critical lenses (political economy, feminist and gender, postcolonial and Indigenous, ecocritical, medium theory); find ideology and hegemony in patterns of texts, with agenda-setting and cultivation; evaluate and compare texts using ethics and evidence of effect; explain how recommendation systems work and why their objectives matter; understand and evaluate generative AI and synthetic media; analyze misinformation at scale and prebunking; explain audience responses with parasocial relationships, entry points and audience labour; analyze representation, the tourist gaze, intersectionality and Indigenous media and data sovereignty; and follow the money through the attention and data economy and current Canadian policy.

Forms, conventions and techniques: you will analyze interfaces, games and memes as media forms (deceptive design, procedural rhetoric, templates) and montage, rhythm, narrative structure and short-form grammar as techniques.

Creating and reflecting: you will write a creative brief with personas and a weighted form choice, plan with technique rationales, scripts, storyboards and a design system, produce responsibly (AI disclosure and labels, consent, fair dealing, Creative Commons, accessibility), test and revise, and reflect with the CEAT frame. The running example is Real or Rendered?, an invented media literacy project about AI-generated images.

It builds on Grade 11 (ENG3U) Media Studies, where you studied layered purposes, semiotics, satire, evaluation criteria, SIFT, uses and gratifications, representation, industry and regulation, convergence, style and production. It connects to the other ENG4U units: Oral Communication, Reading Literary Texts, Reading Informational and Graphic Texts, Writing Essays and Literary Analysis, and Writing Research, Forms and Conventions. All ads, apps, creators, organizations and data in the examples are invented unless named as real.

Curriculum expectations covered: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, 4.2 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 11 and 12: English, 2007, English, Grade 12, University Preparation (ENG4U), Media Studies strand).