Welcome to the SpringBoard program. We hope you will discover how SpringBoard can help you achieve high academic standards, reach your learning goals, and prepare for success in your study of literature and language arts. The program has been created with you in mind: the content you need to learn, the tools to help you learn, and the critical-thinking skills that help you build confidence in your own knowledge and skills.
The College Board publishes the SpringBoard program as a complete language arts curriculum that prepares you for Advanced Placement and college-level study. SpringBoard maps out what successful students should know and be able to do at each grade level to develop the language, reading, writing, and communication skills needed for success. College Board also publishes the SAT and Advanced Placement exams—exams that you are likely to encounter in your high school years.
Connection to Advanced Placement
The College Board’s Advanced Placement program provides the opportunity to complete college-level courses while in high school. In addition to receiving college credits, participation in AP courses helps you develop the skills and knowledge that add to your confidence and ease the transition from high school to college.
The SpringBoard program assists you in preparing for AP-level courses in several ways:
Exposing you to the same types of tasks
as on the AP Language and Literature exams; for example, close reading of
fiction and nonfiction texts, responding to writing prompts, writing under
timed conditions, and writing for multiple purposes (persuasion,
argumentation, literary analysis, and synthesis).
Introducing you to AP strategies, such as TP-CASTT and SOAPSTone, that help you analyze literary and other texts, giving you the tools you need to independently analyze any text.
Preparing you for higher-order skills and behaviors required for
college-level
work through ongoing practice in key skills such as
generating
and organizing ideas, analysis of different types of texts, synthesis and
explanation of concepts, and original writing in a variety of modes.
What Is
the Foundation for SpringBoard?
The foundation of SpringBoard is the College Board Standards for College Success, which set out the knowledge and critical-thinking skills you should acquire to succeed in high school and in future college-level work.
The English Language Arts College Board Standards are divided into five categories: reading, writing, speaking, listening, and media literacy. Your success as a reader depends on many factors, including your interest and motivation to read, the amount of time you spend reading, understanding the purpose for reading, knowledge about a topic, and knowledge about how to read different kinds of text.
Your success as a writer depends on learning many words and how to use those words effectively to communicate a story or information for others to read and understand. Successful writers determine their purpose for writing, such as to explore, inform, express an opinion, persuade, entertain, or to share an experience or emotion. As they write, they also consider their audiences and choose the language that will help them communicate with that audience. Writing is a process that involves several steps, and you will have many opportunities in this program to learn the process and to improve your own writing.
Your success as a speaker is based on how well you communicate orally. What is your message, what words will best communicate it, how do you prepare, or rehearse, for a speech? Good speakers also consider the audience and what they know about a specific topic. They can then deliver a message that uses a shared understanding, or develops one based on common knowledge, with their listeners.
Being a good listener is the other part of effective communication.
Communication
includes the speaker, listener, message, feedback, and noise (the
conditions surrounding the communication). You’ll have opportunities throughout
the program to practice both your speaking and listening skills.
Finally, being media literate
means that you can interpret, analyze, and evaluate the messages you
receive daily from various types of media. Being media literate also means
that you can use the information you gain to express or support a point of
view and influence others.
As you complete the activities in this text, you will develop your skills and knowledge in all of these areas.
How Is
SpringBoard Unique?
SpringBoard is unique because it provides instruction with hands-on participation that involves you and your classmates in daily discussions and analysis of what you’re reading and learning. The book is organized into multiple activities that invite participation by providing adequate space for taking notes and writing your own thoughts and analyses about texts you’re reading or questions you’re answering. Among the key features that make SpringBoard a unique learning experience are:
Activities that thoroughly develop topics, leading to deep
understanding
of the concepts and enabling you to apply learning in multiple situations.
Extensive opportunities to explore a variety of texts—both fiction and nonfiction—that introduce you to many different ways of thinking, writing, and communicating.
Questions that help you examine writing from the perspective of
a
reader and a writer and the techniques that good writers use to
communicate
their messages effectively.
Built-in class discussions and collaborative work that help you explore and express your own ideas while integrating the ideas of others into your base of knowledge.
Integrated performance-based assessments that give you practice in showing what you know and can do, not just repeating what you’ve read.
Assessments that help you decipher tasks and plan how to accomplish those tasks in timed situations like those for standardized tests.
Strategies for Learning
As you complete the activities in this text, you will work on many reading, writing, and oral presentation assignments. You will often work in groups and pairs. To help you do your best, you and your teacher will use a variety of reading, writing, and collaborative learning strategies.
Reading strategies give you specific tools to help you improve your skills in reading and making meaning from text. These strategies will help you improve your ability to analyze text by developing skills in using context clues, finding meaning for unfamiliar words, or organizing your responses to what you read. As you learn to use different reading strategies, it’s important to think about which ones work best for you and why.
Writing
strategies help you focus on your purpose for writing and the message you
want to communicate to your readers. Using writing strategies will help you
analyze your own writing for specific purposes and identify how to improve
that writing using better word choices or punctuating differently or using
sentence structure in different ways.
You and your classmates will use collaborative strategies to explore concepts and answer text-related questions as you work in pairs or in groups to discuss the work you’re doing and to learn from each other.
Performance Portfolio
You will learn to use language in both written and spoken forms in this course. You are encouraged to keep your work in a Working Folder from which you can choose examples to show where you started and how you are growing in your skills and knowledge during the year. Presenting your best work in a Portfolio not only helps you evaluate your own work and improvement, but also helps you explore your unique style and analyze how your work can best represent you.
Presenting your portfolio provides direction as you revisit, revise, and reflect on your work throughout the year. Your teacher will guide you as you include items in your portfolio that illustrate a wide range of work, including examples of reading, writing, oral literacy, and collaborative activities. As you progress through the course, you will have opportunities to revisit prior work, revise it based on new learning, and reflect on the learning strategies
and activities that help you be
successful. The portfolio:
Gives you a specific place to feature your work and a way to share it with others.
Provides an organized, focused way to view your progress throughout the year.
Allows you to reflect on the new skills and strategies you are learning.
Enables you to measure your growth as a reader, writer, speaker, and performer.
Encourages you to revise pieces of work to incorporate new skills.
As you move through each unit, your teacher will instruct you to include certain items in your portfolio. Strong portfolios will include a variety of work from each unit, such as first drafts, final drafts, quickwrites, notes, reading logs, audio and video examples, and graphics that represent a wide variety of genre, forms, and media created for a variety of purposes.
We hope you enjoy using the SpringBoard program. It will give you many opportunities to explore your own and others’ ideas about becoming effective readers, writers, and communicators.
