Grade 12 · English

Grade 12 English

Grade 12 English is the bridge to university and college: independent reading, sophisticated essays, and analysis that explains exactly how a writer's choices work. Here is what the year covers, where students usually lose marks, and one way to help.

What your teen learns this year

Grade 12 English looks much the same across curricula:

  • Close analysis. How specific language choices (imagery, structure, syntax, tone) create meaning.
  • Independent study. Choosing and analysing texts on their own, often in a major project or seminar.
  • The literary essay. An original thesis, sustained over several pages, with precise evidence.
  • Critical perspectives. Reading a text through different lenses, and comparing texts.
  • Writing and speaking. Polished academic writing, and presentations or seminars.

In Ontario, grade 12 English is taken as a university course (ENG4U), a college course (ENG4C) or a workplace course (ENG4E). In the US, it is often British Literature or AP Literature.

Where students usually lose marks

  1. 1Stopping at the device. “The writer uses a metaphor” names the tool but says nothing about what it does.
  2. 2A vague effect. “It makes the reader think” or “it adds interest” could be said of any sentence in any book.
  3. 3Plot summary in disguise. Paragraphs that move through the story in order, retelling it, instead of following the argument.

One of Pip's tricks

Device, effect, purpose

Use it when analysing a literary device, or answering “how does the writer use language to…?”

  1. Device: name it and quote it (a metaphor, repetition, a short sentence after long ones).
  2. Effect: say what it does to a reader, in plain words: slows the pace, makes the room feel small, makes us distrust him.
  3. Purpose: link that effect to what the writer is doing in the text as a whole: the theme, the character, the argument.

Watch it work. In a story about a failing farm: “The field was a grey sheet. The sky was a grey sheet. Between them, my father walked like a crease.”

  • Device: the repeated metaphor of sheets, and the father as a “crease”.
  • Effect: land and sky become one blank, flat thing, and the father a small fold in it.
  • Purpose: the story is about the farm wearing the father down, and the image shows him being flattened by it.

Why it works: naming a device earns nothing on its own. The marks, and the understanding, are in the chain from device to effect to the writer's purpose.

Try three

Tap a choice to see if it is right, with the reason.

  1. 1.“The field was a grey sheet. The sky was a grey sheet.” The effect of the repeated metaphor is…

  2. 2.Which completes the chain from device to effect to purpose?

  3. 3.Which is a weak analysis?

How Sparkpip fits in

Pip, Sparkpip's tutor, works through texts and paragraphs like these with your teen one small step at a time, using methods like the one above.

Start freeSee how it works

Your curriculum

Sparkpip is built on the grade 12 English curriculum for your province or state. The official pages:

Also: Grade 11 English · Grade 12 math · Grade 12 science