MTEL English (61)

Objective 0001 asks you to analyze fiction, drama, poetry and young adult literature, both as a reader and as a teacher. Items often give a short original or public-domain passage and ask what a device achieves, how point of view shapes what we know, or how word choice creates tone. Naming a device is never enough. You also need to explain its effect.

Plot is the arranged sequence of events. Freytag's pyramid divides it into exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement (resolution). Many modern stories break this shape with in medias res openings (starting in the middle of the action), frame narratives, flashbacks, flash-forwards, parallel plots or open endings. Conflict may be external, such as character against character, nature, society or technology. It may also be internal, a character against himself or herself. Characterization is direct when the narrator tells us what a character is like. It is indirect when we infer traits from speech, thoughts, effect on others, actions and looks, which teachers often teach with the acronym STEAL. A round character is complex, and a flat character has one main trait. A dynamic character changes in an important way, while a static character stays the same. A foil sets off the traits of another character by contrast.

Setting covers time, place and social environment, and it can work as atmosphere, as a source of conflict or as a symbol. Theme is the central idea about life that a work suggests. Write it as a complete statement, not a single word. "Ambition" is a topic. "Unchecked ambition destroys the bonds that make power legitimate" is a theme. An objective summary restates the central ideas and key events without opinion or interpretation.

Narrative point of view

An unreliable narrator's account cannot be fully trusted, whether from naivete, self-interest, madness or limited understanding. Poe's narrators and Ishiguro's Stevens in The Remains of the Day are standard examples. Free indirect discourse lets a third-person narrator take on the idiom and feeling of a character without quotation marks. Austen and Woolf are known for it. Stream of consciousness tries to show the unedited flow of thought, as in Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner.

Figurative language departs from literal meaning to create comparison, emphasis or surprise. Connotation is the emotional or cultural association of a word. Denotation is its dictionary meaning. Diction (word choice) and syntax (sentence structure) together make up style. Tone is the author's attitude toward the subject. Mood is the feeling the text creates in the reader. Exam items often hinge on that difference.

High-frequency devices and their effects

Sound devices include alliteration (repeated initial consonant sounds), assonance (repeated vowel sounds), consonance (repeated consonant sounds, often at the ends of words), onomatopoeia, euphony (smooth, pleasant sound) and cacophony (harsh sound).

Common Trap: Students mix up tone and mood. If the question asks how the speaker feels about the subject, it wants tone, for example sardonic, reverent or detached. If it asks how the passage makes a reader feel, it wants mood, for example ominous or serene. A cheerful narrator describing a grim scene can create dramatic irony, so tone and mood may not match.

Meter is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. A foot is one unit of that pattern. An iamb is unstressed-stressed (a-BOUT), a trochee is stressed-unstressed (GAR-den), an anapest is two unstressed then one stressed (in-ter-VENE), and a dactyl is one stressed then two unstressed (MER-ri-ly). A spondee has two stressed syllables, and a pyrrhic has two unstressed. Line length is counted in feet: monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter (an iambic hexameter line is an alexandrine). Iambic pentameter is the main meter of English verse. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, used by Shakespeare and Milton. Free verse has no regular meter or rhyme, as in Whitman. A caesura is a pause inside a line. Enjambment carries a sentence past the line break. An end-stopped line ends with a grammatical pause.

Fixed poetic forms

Other lyric terms include the speaker (never assume the speaker is the poet), the stanza types couplet, tercet, quatrain and octave, terza rima (ABA BCB, as in Dante), ottava rima and rhyme royal. Rhyme can be exact, slant (near), internal or eye rhyme.

Memory Aid: For the main feet, remember "an IAMB goes da-DUM like a heartbeat, a TROCHEE TUMbles DOWNward, an ANapest GALlops, a DACtyl is DANcing." Rising feet (iamb, anapest) end on a stress. Falling feet (trochee, dactyl) begin on one.

Aristotle's Poetics defines tragedy as the imitation of a serious action that arouses pity and fear and ends in catharsis. The tragic hero has hamartia (an error or flaw), often linked to hubris, and goes through peripeteia (a reversal) and anagnorisis (a recognition). Greek drama used a chorus, masks, offstage violence and, in neoclassical readings, the unities of time, place and action. Shakespearean tragedy and history plays use five acts, soliloquies (a character alone speaking thoughts aloud), asides (heard by the audience but not by other characters), comic relief, and blank verse for noble characters with prose for comic or low characters. Comedy moves from confusion toward social restoration, usually ending in marriage. Comedy of manners mocks the conventions of polite society, as in Congreve and Wilde. Farce depends on physical humor and improbable situations. Melodrama exaggerates emotion and moral contrast. Modern realism, as in Ibsen and Chekhov, uses ordinary speech and a box set with a fourth wall. Brecht's epic theater uses the alienation effect to keep audiences critical. Theater of the absurd, as in Beckett and Ionesco, stages a world without meaning through circular dialogue. Stage directions, the dramatis personae, dialogue and subtext are the playwright's main tools.

YA literature has adolescent protagonists, coming-of-age (bildungsroman) conflicts, identity formation, peer and family tensions, and often first-person or close third-person narration. Its genres include realistic fiction, the dystopia (Lowry's The Giver, Collins's The Hunger Games), fantasy, verse novels (Acevedo's The Poet X, Reynolds's Long Way Down), graphic novels (Yang's American Born Chinese) and memoir. Diverse YA titles act as "mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors," Rudine Sims Bishop's metaphor for seeing oneself in literature and seeing into the lives of others. Teachers pair YA texts with canonical works to build engagement and bridge to harder texts. For example, they might pair Thomas's The Hate U Give with To Kill a Mockingbird to look at justice and voice.

Objective 0001 also asks how authors draw on and transform source material. Shakespeare reworked Holinshed's Chronicles and Plutarch. Joyce's Ulysses retells the Odyssey in modern Dublin. Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Jane Eyre from the point of view of Bertha Mason. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead moves Hamlet's minor characters to the center. When you compare two treatments of a topic, look at genre, point of view, structure and tone, and ask what each change emphasizes or questions. Structural choices such as chronology, juxtaposition and withholding information also create effects like suspense, tension and surprise.

Exam Tip: When an item asks about the "effect" or "function" of a device, eliminate options that only define it. The right option ties the device to meaning in this specific passage, such as "emphasizes the speaker's isolation." Options that state a general truth about the device, such as "creates imagery," are usually distractors.