English Language Arts and Reading.8.9.E

The student is expected to

identify and analyze the use of literary devices, including multiple points of view and irony;

author's purpose strand teks talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Author's purpose and craft: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts. The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.

Literary devices are specific language techniques that convey meaning and bring clarity to a text. Students should understand that authors use literary devices, such as multiple points of view, to communicate a detail or message and to affect the reader in specific ways. For example, an author may choose to shift the point of view between characters who witnessed the same event but provide different impressions of what they saw. This can establish a mystery about the truth of the situation and increase the tension in the story. Students should examine the effects of these shifts on the story and how the author achieved the effects.
incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result; as a literary device, irony can be used to create meaning that seems to contradict the literal meaning or events and is often used for humorous or emphatic effect (e.g., “I could care less”)
the perspective from which the events in the story are told

Research

1. Dallacqua, A. K. (2012). Exploring literary devices in graphic novels. Language Arts, 89(6), 365–378. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ981296

Summary: This article presents an innovative approach to exploring literary devices by using comics. The study emphasized the importance of multimodality, especially as it relates to visual literacy. Multiple online resources and definitions are included. The article includes the multiple uses of graphic novels as part of a Reading and Language Arts class. 

2. VanDerHeide, J., & Juzwik, M. M. (2018). Argument as conversation: Students responding through writing to significant conversations across time and place. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(1), 67–77. doi:10.1002/jaal.754

Summary: In this article, the author presents an instructional model that reconnects to the why of writing. The model of information reasoning requires students to learn how to make a claim, provide supporting evidence of that claim, and create additional examples of the claim through the use of analogies and stories. In this study, students were asked to write a letter in response to an ongoing conversation that was important to them. Personal experience helps to develop the students' ability to advocate for a position through writing. The approach requires scaffolding on argumentative writing instruction. This study includes multiple templates to guide the writing of the responses. This approach fosters the opportunity for students to participate in conversations that have a historical background. In doing so, students engage in topics of debate that have continued over time and in various spaces. Students are invited to participate in these discussions through their writing positions as arguing for or against a position.