MTEL English (61) cheat sheet

Iambic pentameter = five iambic feet (unstressed-stressed) = ten syllables per line; blank verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter, the default line of Shakespeare and Milton.

Sonnet forms: Petrarchan/Italian = octave (abbaabba) plus sestet (cdecde or cdcdcd), volta usually at line 9; Shakespearean/English = three quatrains (abab cdcd efef) plus a couplet (gg), volta often at line 13.

Point of view taxonomy: first person (participant narrator), third-person limited (interiority of one character), omniscient (access to multiple minds), objective/dramatic (no interior access, only observable action).

Tone is the author's attitude toward the subject; mood is the feeling produced in the reader. Items asking about emotional effect generally target mood, not tone.

Tropes to distinguish: metaphor (implied comparison), simile (like/as), metonymy (associated object for the concept, e.g. 'the pen' for writing), synecdoche (part for whole), personification, hyperbole, litotes, oxymoron, paradox.

Three ironies: dramatic (audience knows what the character does not), verbal (speaker means the opposite of the words), situational (outcome reverses expectation).

Structural and genre labels, not figures of speech: bildungsroman, in medias res, frame narrative, epistolary novel, stream of consciousness, roman à clef, picaresque.

Approximate period markers for US and British literature: Colonial (1607-1765), Revolutionary (1765-1790), Romantic/Transcendental (c. 1830-1865), Realism (1865-1900), Naturalism (c. 1890-1910), Modernism (1914-1945), Postmodernism (post-1945).

Critical lenses: formalist (text alone), biographical, historical/new historicist, psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, reader-response, deconstruction. Select the lens that matches what the question asks you to foreground.

Hierarchy of linguistic analysis: phoneme, morpheme, word, phrase, clause, sentence. Subfields: phonetics/phonology (sound), morphology (word structure), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (literal meaning), pragmatics (meaning in use).

Free morphemes stand alone (dog, happy); bound morphemes must attach (un-, -ness, -ed). English has eight inflectional suffixes: plural -s, possessive -'s, third-person -s, past -ed, past participle -en/-ed, present participle -ing, comparative -er, superlative -est.

Inflectional affixes never change the part of speech; derivational affixes usually do (teach becomes teacher). In English word formation, inflectional suffixes attach outside derivational ones (e.g. rationalizations).

Letters and phonemes do not map one-to-one: 'through' has seven letters and three phonemes; 'box' has three letters and four phonemes. Counting sounds, not letters, is the standard item type.

Minimal-pair test establishes phoneme status by substituting one sound in the same environment (ship/sheep, pat/bat). Allophones are non-contrastive variants, such as aspirated /p/ in 'pin' versus unaspirated /p/ in 'spin'.

Periodization of English: Old English (c. 450-1100, heavily inflected, Germanic), Middle English (c. 1100-1500, Norman French vocabulary, Chaucer), Modern English (c. 1500-present, leveled inflections, Shakespeare, Great Vowel Shift).

Gricean maxims: quantity, quality, relation, manner. Flouting a maxim produces conversational implicature, so an utterance can be meaningful without being literally true or complete.

Sociolinguistic terms: dialect (regional or social variety with its own systematic grammar), register (situational variety), idiolect (individual pattern), pidgin (contact code, no native speakers), creole (nativized pidgin with full grammar).

Competence (internalized knowledge) versus performance (actual use); descriptive grammar documents how speakers use language, prescriptive grammar states rules of correctness.

Rhetorical triangle: writer/speaker, audience, subject. Corresponding appeals are ethos (credibility and character), pathos (emotion and values), logos (reasoning and evidence).

Toulmin model: claim, data/grounds, warrant, backing, qualifier, rebuttal. Warrants are usually implicit, and identifying the unstated warrant is the most common analytical task.

Fallacies of relevance: ad hominem, ad populum, misplaced appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, straw man, red herring. Fallacies of ambiguity: equivocation, amphiboly, accent. Fallacies of presumption: begging the question, false dilemma, hasty generalization, post hoc, slippery slope.

Modes of discourse: narration, description, exposition (subtypes: definition, classification, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, process), and argumentation/persuasion.

The writing process is recursive, not linear: invention, drafting, revising (global meaning and organization), editing (local grammar and style), publishing. Revision is not proofreading.

Coordination joins equal grammatical units (comma plus FANBOYS); subordination makes one clause dependent (because, although, when, which) and should encode the actual logical relationship rather than simple sequence.

Sentence-boundary errors: fragment (lacks an independent clause), fused/run-on sentence (two independent clauses with no punctuation), comma splice (comma alone between independent clauses). Repairs: period, semicolon, or coordinating conjunction.

Restrictive clauses take no commas and identify the noun ('the novel that I lost'); nonrestrictive clauses take commas and add removable information ('My novel, which I lost, arrived').

Concision rules: prefer active voice unless the actor is unknown or the receiver deserves focus; replace nominalizations with verbs (make a decision becomes decide); keep coordinate items parallel in lists and comparisons.

Three cueing systems used during oral reading: graphophonic (letters and sounds), syntactic (grammar and word order), semantic (meaning and context). Running records document which system the reader drew on.

Common running-record accuracy benchmarks: independent 95-100 percent, instructional 90-94 percent, frustration below 90 percent, each paired with a comprehension check.

Fluency has three measurable components: accuracy, automatic rate (words correct per minute), and prosody (phrasing, expression, attention to punctuation).

Five pillars of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension. Phonological awareness is the broad umbrella; phonemic awareness is the phoneme-level subset and is entirely oral.

Informational text structures: description, sequence/chronological, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution. Signal words such as 'however,' 'therefore,' 'first,' and 'as a result' cue the structure.

Text complexity is judged on three fronts: quantitative (readability formulas, Lexile), qualitative (levels of meaning, structure, language clarity, knowledge demands), and reader-and-task considerations.

Assessment contrast: norm-referenced tests compare a student to peers (percentile ranks); criterion-referenced tests compare performance to a defined standard or objective set. Reliability means consistency; validity means measuring what is claimed.

Vocabulary tiers: Tier 1 basic conversational words, Tier 2 high-frequency academic words across content areas, Tier 3 domain-specific technical terms. Tier 2 words usually yield the greatest instructional payoff.

Comprehension strategy set: predicting, questioning, visualizing, monitoring and repairing, summarizing, and determining importance; graphic organizers externalize text structure for recall.