To learn more about including these Supplemental AP Projects in this English 12 unit, please see our Guide to Supplemental AP Language and Composition Projects.

A substantial portion of these projects is devoted to honing student’s rhetorical analysis skills and crafting rhetorical analysis arguments similar to those required in Free Response Question 2 on the AP English Language and Composition Exam. This unit has three Supplementary AP Projects related to the theme of environmental justice and the developing world. In this unit the teacher will work on developing students’ abilities to offer a complex analysis of the author’s craft, including how the author develops multiple themes within the novel. Identifying lines of text worthy of close examination and conversation will be the first step in this process. The first is incorporating a model of reading and discussion that asks the students to not simply answer complex literary questions, but to pose those questions themselves.

There are also two primary skill areas of focus in the unit.

For this reason, the teacher is encouraged to use timelines, guides to literary allusions, and or other classroom visuals or handouts to aid students in accessing and analyzing this complex text. The nonlinear plot structure of the novel as well as the multiple literary allusions and very creative use of language will provide a challenge to even the most advanced readers. In their examination of The God of Small Things, students will focus on the “small things”-literary devices, plot structure, and language-employed by Arundhati Roy to accomplish the “big things”-her rich commentary on history, colonialism, love, and memory. Told from a variety of perspectives and in a nonlinear format, the book is a complex and rich read that will both challenge and captivate students. It traces the stories of twins, Estha and Rahel, whose lives are forever shaped by a pivotal event that occurs in their early childhood. Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize, awarded to the best new piece of fiction published in the UK each year, The God of Small Things, by Indian writer Arundhati Roy, is set in the Kerala state of India and takes place over the course of two weeks in 1969 and one day of 1993.

The god of small