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(More customer reviews)First, a caution: one might expect that any high school literature textbook meets certain basic standards. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And it turns out not to have been an easy thing to identify which publisher offers the level of support necessary to meet basic objectives.
I hope this review will save you some trouble! Look for Prentice Hall.
Prentice Hall's literature textbooks provide a nearly definitive anthology of English language literature and other major works of historic importance, and offer very strong support for classroom instruction. Wherever possible, the literature excerpts are complete works; in other cases, the samples are of sufficient length to provide an effective representation of style and content.
Serving on my county's textbook selection committee provided me with disturbing insights into some ways that some schools prepare for end-of-year testing. When I reviewed literature textbooks from several major publishers, I found the comparison quite shocking. You can make this comparison for yourself by perusing on-line the tables of contents for textbooks offered by various publishers.
The Prentice Hall textbooks are all quite strong. Textbooks by the other three publishers reviewed by our committee were impoverished and spare, teaching exclusively to end-of-year tests. Instead of providing materials to teach the basic skills which are intended to be assessed by those end-of-year tests, the other publishers focused on providing practice in test-taking -- i.e., in bubble-filling and guessing games. For example, one slim volume contained less than one third the text of the Prentice Hall anthology, and offered only a scant selection of writings, all of questionable merit. Among those writings proposed for use in literary analysis were several Garfield cartoons. I have nothing against Garfield cartoons; however, it is not possible to develop skills in critical analysis by reviewing such simple fare.
Students must be exposed to great literature before they can recognize or reproduce effective writing. Students must be provided with substantive information and assisted to develop real skills before they can respond confidently to end-of-year test questions. Instead of learning strategies for guessing, that time should best be devoted to the development of real knowledge and useful skills.
Fortunately, there is at least one company which still provides the materials necessary for an effective preparatory education in language arts. Prentice Hall's high school literature textbooks provide a solid foundation for teaching classic and modern literature to college-track high-school students. Instead of Garfield cartoons and one-line excerpts from some other literary selections, the Prentice Hall textbooks include representative works by many great authors, and challenging questions to help the student learn to think carefully and communicate clearly -- arguably the most important objectives for the language arts curriculum.
A small sample of some of the authors included in the Prentice Hall 11th grade American Literature text is as follows: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Phyllis Wheatley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mary W. Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sojourner Truth, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Jack London, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Robert Frost, William Safire, Amy Tan, John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Arthur Miller -- and many more.
Nicely done.
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Prentice Hall Literature: The British Tradition Timeless Voices Timeless Themes
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