MTEL English (61) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what a character knows and what the audience or reader knows, creating tension or humor; Oedipus vowing to punish a killer he does not realize is himself is the classic case.

Bildungsroman

A novel tracing a protagonist's moral and psychological growth from youth toward maturity; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist are standard examples.

Iambic pentameter

A metrical line of five iambic feet, each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, totaling ten syllables; the basis of Shakespearean blank verse.

Free indirect discourse

Third-person narration that absorbs a character's vocabulary, judgments, and thoughts without quotation marks or reporting tags, blending narrator and character voices on the same sentence.

Objective correlative

T. S. Eliot's term for a set of objects, situations, or images that reliably evokes a particular emotion in the reader without the writer naming that emotion.

In medias res

Opening a narrative in the middle of the action rather than at its chronological beginning; earlier events are supplied later through flashback or exposition.

Synecdoche

A trope in which a part stands for a whole or a whole for a part, as in 'all hands on deck,' 'wheels' for a car, or 'the crown' for a monarch.

Soliloquy

A speech in which a character alone on stage voices private thoughts, addressing the audience rather than another character; Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' is the familiar instance.

Phoneme

The smallest contrastive unit of sound in a language; swapping one for another changes meaning, as /p/ and /b/ distinguish pat from bat.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language carrying meaning or grammatical function; 'unhappiness' contains three, namely the bound prefix un-, the free base happy, and the bound suffix -ness.

Minimal pair

Two words identical except for one phoneme in the same position, used to prove that the differing sounds are separate phonemes, as with ship and sheep.

Inflectional versus derivational affixes

Inflectional affixes mark grammatical categories such as tense, number, or comparison and never change part of speech; derivational affixes build new words and frequently shift the grammatical category.

Great Vowel Shift

A chain of pronunciation changes roughly between 1400 and 1700 that raised and fronted Middle English long vowels, accounting for many spelling-pronunciation mismatches in Modern English.

Grimm's Law

A statement of regular consonant correspondences between Proto-Indo-European and Germanic, where stops became fricatives; Latin pater and tres correspond to English father and three.

Register

A situational variety of language chosen for a particular audience, purpose, and setting, ranging from formal academic prose to casual conversation and marked by lexical and syntactic choices.

Cooperative principle

Grice's assumption that conversationalists work together, generating maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner whose deliberate flouting produces conversational implicature.

Toulmin warrant

In the Toulmin model, the general principle or assumption licensing the step from data to claim; it is often unstated and is typically expressed in a 'since' clause.

Straw man fallacy

Refuting a distorted or weakened version of an opponent's position instead of the actual argument, so the refutation succeeds only against a position nobody holds.

Post hoc fallacy

Concluding that one event caused another merely because it preceded it; the Latin tag is post hoc ergo propter hoc, and temporal order alone never establishes causation.

Ad hominem

Attacking the arguer's character, motives, or circumstances rather than the reasoning offered; a fallacy of relevance because it never engages the claim itself.

Nonrestrictive clause

A relative clause supplying additional, removable information about an already identified noun and set off by commas, as in 'My sister, who lives in Ohio, teaches.'

Parallel structure

Giving coordinate elements the same grammatical form, as in 'to read, to write, to revise,' which clarifies relationships and controls rhythm in sentences and lists.

Enthymeme

An argument with a premise left unstated and supplied by the audience, as in 'She's a musician; she'll appreciate this,' where the missing premise stays implicit.

Kairos

The rhetorical appeal to timeliness and fitness of occasion; an argument persuades partly because the moment, audience, and circumstances make it the right thing to say.

Running record

An assessment in which a teacher records a child's oral reading, marking substitutions, omissions, insertions, and self-corrections to compute accuracy and infer cue use.

Independent reading level

The text difficulty at which a student reads with roughly 95 percent or higher word accuracy and solid comprehension without teacher scaffolding, suitable for free-choice reading.

Instructional reading level

The level at which a student reads with about 90 to 94 percent accuracy and adequate comprehension, challenging enough to support new learning when the teacher scaffolds.

Phonemic awareness

The oral ability to notice and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words through blending, segmenting, and deleting; it involves no print and precedes phonics instruction.

Text structure

The organizational pattern of informational text, such as description, sequence, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, or problem-solution, which guides comprehension, note taking, and recall.

Tier two words

High-frequency academic vocabulary appearing across content areas, such as analyze, contrast, or consist; these words are prime targets for explicit instruction.

Criterion-referenced test

An assessment that compares a student's performance to a defined standard or set of learning objectives rather than to the scores of a norming group.

Miscue analysis

Interpreting oral reading errors as evidence of the strategies a reader applies, classifying each substitution or omission as semantically, syntactically, or visually driven.