OAE Middle Grades Language Arts (028)

Epic Poetry

recount heroic deeds and adventures

Epistolary Poems

poems that are written and read as letters

Ballad

often follow a rhyme scheme and meter and focus on subject such as love, death, and religion

Elegies

mourning poem

Odes

a lyric poem that expresses strong emotions about life

Pastoral Poems

idealize nature and country living

Epigrams

memorable rhymes with one or two lines

Limercks

two lines of iambic dimeter followed by two lines of iambic dimeter and another iambic trimeter

Denotation

literal meaning of a word

Connotation

an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.

Figurative language

extends past the literal meaning of words

Alliteration

describes a series of words beginning with the same sound

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Personification

A figure of speech in which an object or animal is given human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes

Hyperbole

excessive exaggeration used for humor or emphasis rather than literal meaning

Verbal Irony

uses words opposite to the meaning

Situational Irony

what happens contrasts what is expected

Dramatic Irony

narrative informs readers of more than characters know

Idioms

words and phrases that mean something different from the literal meanings of the words

ex: "break a leg" or "call it a day"

Elegy

a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

Apostrophe

A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love.

Expository Writing

writing that explains or informs; organized so that each paragraph focuses on explaining one idea or part of an idea

Persuasive Writing

A kind of speaking or writing that is intended to influence people's actions and/or thoughts; uses paragraphs for different purposes to organize the parts of the argument

Stanza

a group of verses similarly connected

Couplets

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme

Soliloquies

speeches in which one actor speaks aloud revealing his or her inner thoughts

Monologues

a speech by a single character without another character's response

Aside

dialogue that informs audiences but is unheard by other characters

Climax

when action or dramatic tension reaches its highest point; also the character's turning point

Man versus self

internal conflict

Man versus nature

A run-in with the forces of nature. On the one hand, it expresses the insignificance of a single human life in the cosmic scheme of things. On the other hand, it tests the limits of a person's strength and will to live; external conflict

Man versus society

The values and customs by which everyone else lives are being challenged. The character may come to an untimely end as a result of his or her own convictions. The character may, on the other hand, bring others around to a sympathetic point of view, or it may be decided that society was right after all; external conflict

Man versus Man

the conflict is often resolved by two parties coming to some sort of agreement or by party triumphing over the other party

Mood

a story's atmosphere, or the feelings the reader gets from reading it; writers select descriptive words to evoke certain moods

Tone

the emotions and attitudes of the writer that she/he expresses in the writing

First-Person Point of View

a character in the story is actually telling the story himself/herself

Second-Person Point of View

The narrator tells the story using the pronouns "You", "Your," and "Yours" to address a reader or listener directly

Third-Person Point of View

someone on the outside is looking in and telling the story as he/she see it unfold.

Objective Third-Person

narration does not include what the characters described are thinking or feeling

Subjective Third-Person

narration does include what the characters described are thinking or feeling

Third-Person Omniscient

narrator knows everything about all the characters

Third-Person Limited

the narrator may know everything about a particular character, but is limited to that one character

Postcolonial Theory

involves the historical and geographical context of a work and leads readers to consider how colonization informs the plot, characters, settings, etc.

Gender and Feminist Theory

invites readers to interpret a text by looking at its treatment of and suggestions about women and culture's treatment of women

Structuralism

uses the structure and organization of a work and the foundations of language to examine how and what a text conveys about the human experience and how those findings connect to common human experiences

New Historicisim

heavily relies on the cultural and historical context of a work

Reader-Response Theory

uses the individual reader's response to the text and experience while reading the text to examine the meaning of the reader's relationship with the text and what that relationship suggests about the reader

Sociological Criticism

considers the societies that are relevant to a text

Influences on Language

1. ethnicity

2. religious beliefs

3. gender

Dialects

subsets of languages that do not violate the rules of the language as a whole

ex: African American Vernacular

Phonological Awareness

the ability to perceive sound structures in a spoken word

Phonemes

The sounds represented by the letters in the alphabet

Onset sounds

the initial sound in a word

Rime

the sounds that follow the onset in a word

Alphabetic Principle

refers to the use of letters and combinations of letters to represent speech sounds

Top-Down Processing

the listener refers to background and global knowledge to figure out the meaning of a message

Bottom-Up Processing

the listener figures out the meaning of a message by using "data" obtained from what is said

Historical Fiction

A type of realistic fiction that takes place in a particular time period in the past. Often the setting is real, but the characters are made up from the author's imagination.

Ex: "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy

Picaresque

novels that recount episodic adventures of a rogue protagonist (picaro)

Ex: "Don Quiote" by Miguel de Cervante

Gothic

featuring horror, mystery, suspicion, madness, supernatural elements

Ex: "Dracula" by Bram Stoker or "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley

Psychological Novels

explore characters motivations

Ex: George Eliot novels, "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoyvesky, "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert

Epistolary Novels

novels are told in the form of letters written by characters rather than in typical narrative form

Pastoral Novels

Lyrically idealize country life as idyllic and utopian, akin to the Garden of Eden.

Bildungsroman

German for "education novel;" coming-of-age stories

Roman a Clef

French for "novel with a key;" books that require a real-life frame of reference

iamb

unstressed, stressed syllables in each verse

Haiku

17-syllable, traditionally distributed across three line 5/7/5; captures a nature scene or moment

Concrete Poems

arranges so the full poem takes a shape that is relevant to the poem's message

Free Verse

Poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme

3 types of dramas classified as comedy

1.farce

2.romantic comedy

3.the satirical comedy

Explicit vs. implicit information

explicit: the reader is told by the author exactly what is meant

implicit: does not state explicitly, so the readers have to infer

Rhetoric

the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing; uses logic, emotions, or moral/ethical values

Persuasive Techniques

1. appeal using reason

2. appeal to emotions

3. appeal to character, morality, ethics

4.appeal to greed

5. appeal to laziness

Pathos

appeals to emotion

Ethos

appeals to credibility or ethics

Logos

appeals to logic

Rhetorical Devices

1. anecdote: a brief story

2. aphorisms: state common beliefs

3. allusions: literary or historical figures to allude to

4. satire: exaggerates, ridicules, or pokes fun

5. parody: imitates another work

6. paradox: a statement that is true despite appearing contradictory

7. hyperbole: overstatement

8. oxymoron: combines seeming contradictions

9. analogies: compare two things that share common elements

10. similes/metaphors

11. deductive reasoning: moves from general to specific

12. inductive reasoning: from specific to general

13. diction: author word choice

14. understatement: downplaying

15. chiasmus: uses parallel clauses, the second reversing the order of the first

16. anaphora: regularly repeats a word or phrase at the beginnings of consecutive clauses/phrases

Dark Romantics

associated with both the Romantic and Gothic movements; dark themes and tones

Ex: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville

Transcendentalism

shared the romantic emphasis on emotion and also focused heavily on how a person experiences life through their sense; through a person's sense they could transcend to a state of being above physical humanity

Ex: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman

Colonial America

literature includes essays and sermons that discuss religion or the way the Puritans believed one should live and conduct onself

American Romantic

aka American Renaissance; featuring a narrow view of American politics and social issues at the time

Harlem Renaissance

took place in America during the 1920's and 30's; a group of African Americans were given the opportunity to express their talents

British Neoclassical

began in the middle of the 17th century; slight inc. of female writers where there work was viewed as self-reflection and improvement

Victorian Era

1837-1901; topics appeared such as evolution, psychology, and colonization

Informational Text

a nonfiction text, written to share factual information; CAN NOT include opinions - strictly facts

Expository Text

this type of text informs or instructs the reader. It is nonfiction; CAN include opinions

World Literary Characteristics

African Literature: metaphorical, structured or written in the form of a paradox

Asian Literature: features writing from many countries (ex: haiku); characterized by unique & innovative writing & the use of figurative language

Latin American: large volume of poetry and whimsical imagery of spiritual ideas

Old English

The Anglo-Saxon language spoken from approximately 450 to 1150 A.D. in what is now Great Britain; relied on inflections to create meaning placing little importance on the order of the words in the sentence

Middle English

The language spoken in England roughly between 1150 and 1500 A.D; created variations by using affixes and synonyms - development of grammar

Naturalism

rejected the emotional focus and sentimentality of Romanticism and provided a type of social commentary

Modernism

an attempt to to turn away from the norms and traditions of literature and use new techniques and methods; often used techniques to outline issues in society

Postmodernism

Post-World War II intellectual movement; reliance on science and universal assertions

Media

1.Instructional Videos

2. CD's

3. Television/Radio

4. Newspapers

5. Websites

6. Presentations

7. Posters/brochures

8. Flyers & fact sheets

8 parts of speech

1. noun

2. pronouns

3. verbs

4. adjectives

5. adverbs

6. prepositions

7. conjunctions

8. interjections

Common nouns

generic names for people, places, and things- not usually capitalized

Proper nouns

name specific people, places, or things - usually capitalized

General nouns

the names of conditions or ideas

Specific nouns

name people, places, things that are understood by using your senses

Collective nouns

the names for a group of people, places, or things that may act as a whole

ex: class, company, dozen, group, team

Personal pronouns

I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, they, them, their, theirs