ILTS English Language Arts (207) cheat sheet

English Language Arts

• Literary periods in sequence: Old English (Beowulf, ca. 700-1000), Middle English (Chaucer, ca. 1340-1400), Renaissance/Elizabethan (Shakespeare, Spenser, 1550-1600), Metaphysical and Cavalier poets (Donne, Marvell, 1600s), Restoration and Augustan/Neoclassical (Dryden, Pope, Swift, 1660-1750), Romantic (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Shelley, 1798-1832), Victorian (Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Eliot, 1832-1901), Modernist (Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Faulkner, 1914-1945), Postmodern and contemporary (post-1945).

• Genre markers: tragedy centers on a protagonist of high estate whose hamartia produces a reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) ending in catastrophe; comedy moves from obstruction to union or social renewal; epic opens in medias res with an invocation and a hero whose actions determine a nation's fate; lyric is a short first-person meditation; satire blends irony, exaggeration, and ridicule to correct vice.

• Poetic form rules: a sonnet has 14 lines in iambic pentameter - Shakespearean rhymes abab cdcd efef gg with a closing couplet, Petrarchan divides octave (abbaabba) from sestet (cdecde); a villanelle has 19 lines, five tercets and a quatrain, with two refrains; blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter; free verse has no fixed meter or rhyme.

• Sound devices: alliteration repeats initial consonant sounds, assonance repeats vowel sounds within words, consonance repeats final consonants, onomatopoeia imitates sound, and rhyme schemes are labeled with letters by line-ending sound. Meter is scanned by stress pattern: iamb (unstressed-stressed), trochee (stressed-unstressed), anapest (unstressed-unstressed-stressed), dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed).

• Figurative language distinctions: simile compares using like or as; metaphor asserts identity without like or as; personification gives human traits to nonhuman things; metonymy substitutes an associated object (the crown for the monarchy); synecdoche substitutes a part for a whole or whole for a part; hyperbole exaggerates; litotes affirms by negating the opposite; paradox is a self-contradictory statement that reveals truth; oxymoron joins contradictory terms.

• Narrative point of view: first person uses I and is limited to the narrator's knowledge; second person addresses you; third-person omniscient enters multiple minds; third-person limited stays with one character's perceptions; objective or dramatic point of view reports only observable action. Unreliable narration occurs when a narrator's account conflicts with implied authorial meaning.

• Writing process and rhetoric: the classical appeals are ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic); the rhetorical triangle joins speaker, audience, and subject; argument structure includes claim, evidence, warrant, and rebuttal. The writing process is recursive - prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing - and revision addresses organization and idea development while editing addresses conventions.

• Grammar and usage distinctions tested on ILTS: restrictive clauses take that and no commas, nonrestrictive clauses take which and commas; who/whom depends on case in the clause; lie/lay and sit/set differ by transitive versus intransitive use; fewer applies to count nouns and less to mass nouns; between governs two items and among governs three or more; dangling modifiers occur when the introductory phrase's implied subject is not the main clause subject.

• Reading assessment and literacy instruction: running records and miscue analysis classify errors as substitutions, omissions, insertions, and reversals; fluency is measured by words correct per minute plus accuracy and prosody; the Simple View of Reading holds that comprehension equals decoding multiplied by linguistic comprehension; the three cueing systems are semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic; text complexity is judged by quantitative measures, qualitative features, and reader-task considerations.