Key Vocabulary:
Genres: Types of literary pieces.
Text Structures: The way that the author formats their text.
Text Features: Features of a text that have a desired effect on the readers.
Narratives Genres:
Fables: Short stories with a specific moral, such as The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Folktales: Stories where a hero overcome adversity using their specific virtues.
Myths: Fictional stories that were written to explain natural phenomena.
Legends: The story of a hero’s courageous actions.
Modern Literacy Tales: Modern folktales.
Fantastic Stories: Also known as the fantasy sub-genre.
Science Fiction: Stories that involve possible, but imaginary, scientific realities.
High Fantasy: Fantastic Stories that focus on good vs. evil.
Contemporary Stories: Stories with a modern setting.
Historical Stories: Realistic stories with a past setting.
Elements of Story Structure:
- Plot: The sequence of events in a story.
- Characters: People or animals that the story follows.
- Setting: Time and location of the story.
- Point of View: The perspective that the story is told from.
- Theme: The meaning of the story.
Narrative Devices:
- Dialogue: Conversation between characters.
- Flashback: A glimpse at the past in the world of the story.
- Foreshadowing: Hints of future plot points.
- Imagery: The way words and phrases are used to “draw” an image in the reader’s mind.
- Suspense: The state of not knowing what will happen next in the story.
- Symbolism: Something that represents something else.
- Tone: The feeling of the story.
Text Factors of Nonfiction Books: The way nonfiction literature is formatted in order to best present the information to the reader.
Expository Text Structures:
- Description: The author describes something by listing characteristics.
- Sequence: Events are listed in chronological order.
- Cause-Effect: The author shows a cause along with the resulting effects.
- Problem-Solution: The author shows a problem along with its potential solutions.
Text Factors of Poetry: The layout of a poem.
Formats of Poetry: Picture book versions of a single poem, specialized collections of poems, or comprehensive anthologies of a poet’s work.
Poetic Forms:
- Rhymed Verse: A poem that rhymes.
- Narrative Poems: Poems that tell a story.
- Haiku: Japanese poem containing three lines with five, seven, and five syllables respectively.
- Free Verse: A poem that does not rhyme or have meter.
- Odes: A poem that praises something.
- Concrete Poems: A poem where the lines are arranged to form a picture.
Minilessons: A sort of “subplot” of the lesson plan. The teaching of processes, strategies, concepts, etc. that are all included within the main lesson.
Comprehension Strategies: Methods of comprehending the meaning of a literary work.
Assessing Knowledge of Text Factors:
- Planning: Teachers decide what they will teach and how they will assess what they teach.
- Monitoring: Teachers track their students’ progress.
- Evaluating: Teachers encourage their students to apply what they have learned.
- Reflecting: Teachers facilitate the process of students reflecting on what they have learned.
Classroom Application:
In the classroom, it is most important that students comprehend the literary content, rather than simply learner how to spit out information onto a piece of paper. One way of ensuring that students understand what they are learning is to ask them to write their own literary pieces in a specific style or with specific features.
Morgan Wyatt 