Praxis II: English Content & Analysis Exam (5039) Study Guide

Praxis II: English Content & Analysis Exam (5039)

Study Guide

Vocabulary:

 Constructivism: as readers become involved with a text they construct meaning

through an active process of integrating what they are reading with their own

reactions, knowledge, belief and ideas

 Schemas: cognitive connections that are molded in an individual’s mind over time

and shape a person’s worldview

 Literary criticism: the formal study, analysis and evaluation of literary texts

 American literature: usually studied chronologically or thematically beginning with

texts from the early colonists who wrote about exploration.

 Canon: a group of works that are considered to be culturally, artistically or

historically significant.

 Conceit: a figure of speech that creates a parallel between two dissimilar things

o Ex: The Sun Rising by John Donne (the sun/busy old fool)

 Rhyme scheme: arrangement of rhyming words in a stanza or poem

 Slant rhyme: not a true rhyme, substitutes assonance or consonance

 Internal rhyme: rhyming two core more words in the same line of poetry

 Rhythm: heartbeat of a poem

 Meter: established rhythm within a poem in which accentuated syllables are repetitive

and predictable

 Foot: unit of meter that has stressed and unstressed syllables

 Iamb: familiar poetic foot which occurs when an unaccented syllable is followed by

an accented one

o EX: the word contain.

,  Blank verse: poetry that is written in iambic pentameter and unrhymed –

Shakespeare/Paradise Lost

 Free verse: poetry without patterns

 Repetition: to emphasize important ideas and heighten language

 Assonance: inclusion of words with the same vowel sound within one or two lines of

poetry

 Consonance: repetition of the same consonant sounds at the end of a stressed syllable

but following different vowel sounds

o “Whose woods are these”

 Closed form: poetry that follows a given formula or shape

o EX: quatrain, sonnet, ballad

 Open form: does not have restrictions

 Literary theory: using a set of principles or system of ideas to interpret literature from

a unique angle

 Reader-response theory: centered on the idea that as readers read, they experience a

transaction with the text.

 Feminist literary theory: involves asking questions about the degree to which a

literary text perpetuates the ideas that women are inferior to and dependent upon men.

 Queer theory: investigates texts by asking questions about gender and sexuality

 Deconstructionist literary criticism: focuses on dissecting and uncovering the writer’s

assumptions about what is true and false, good and bad.

 Semiotic analysis: study of signs, signals, visual messages, and gestures.

 Marxist theory: focuses on the economic system that structure society and the ways

human behavior is motivated by a desire for economic power.