Grades 9-12 Philosophy and Department Overview

The Language Arts department offers a wide variety of courses that enrich students’ written and oral communication skills. Through the required English courses, students experience a curriculum rich in literature, writing, and speech. During the ninth grade, students are required to take both English I and Freshman Seminar. Tenth and eleventh grade English concentrates on American and World Literature, exposing students to a variety of authors and genres with continued work in the area of research, vocabulary development, and critical reading.   During twelfth grade, students have a wide array of choices that includes both full year and semester courses. This course selection has been designed to personalize instruction for seniors by focusing on their emerging interests and abilities while providing excellent preparation for college.

The Language Arts department also offers electives and co-curricular activities associated with those electives. These include Creative Writing, Journalism, Speech Arts, and Film.  Other elective classes include Sports America and Twenty-First Century Communication: Writing for Pop Culture and New Media.  The school yearbook, The Golden C, the online school newspaper, Cranford Dialogue, and the literary magazine, Prologue, are activities open to all students. In short, the Cranford High School Language Arts department seeks to cultivate and nurture life-long critical reading and writing abilities in its students; galvanized with strong communication skills, students will be ready to meet any challenge.   

For more detailed course descriptions, please review the Cranford High School Program of Studies.

This screencast provides highlights about the Language Arts program and co-curricular activities.

Please visit the Dr. Deborah Cannon Partridge Wolfe Library and Learning Commons for additional resources.

Please check the Cranford High School website in June for summer reading assignments.