Middle School English and Language Arts Unit Key Vocabulary

Character - persons, animals, things, or natural forces presented in literature.

Context Clues - Context clues are words or phrases that typically surround an unfamiliar word for the purpose of helping a reader understand the new word. Context clues are typically built into the sentences around the difficult word. Awareness of context clues allows a reader to make logical guesses/inferences about word meanings.

Genre - A category of literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content is a genre. For example, poetry is a genre of literature.

Plot - Plot is events that make up a story.

Prediction - A prediction is a statement or forecast made about the future. Predicting links information read in a text to prior experience for the purpose of understanding and anticipating the outcomes of events, characters, and conflict in a story.

Setting - In literature texts, setting is the time and place where the events of the story take place. The sequence of the settings in a text provides the structure for most literature readings.

Summary - Summarizing is to order the most significant events in the text into a format that allows a reader unfamiliar with the passage to gain an overview of the events of a story.

Textual Evidence - Textual evidence refers to an explicit support from a reading passage that proves students' answers. Often textual evidence is either an example from the text that proves an inference/generalization or a direct quote from the text that supports an answer provided by students.