GACE® English (6–12) (713)
Practice Test

Testlet 218

Reading and Analysis of Texts (6–12)

Organizational structures, central ideas, source credibility, and evidence: organizational structures of informational and argumentative texts — description (uses examples and attributes to explain a topic), sequence/chronological order (events or steps in time order), compare-contrast (examines similarities and differences; signal words: however, similarly, in contrast, unlike), cause-effect (shows how events or conditions produce others; signal words: because, therefore, as a result, consequently), and problem-solution (identifies a problem and proposes solutions); text features that aid comprehension: headings and subheadings (signal the structure and main ideas of each section), table of contents and index (navigation and reference tools), glossary (key term definitions), sidebars and call-out boxes (supplementary or contextual information), bold/italicized text (emphasis on key terms or vocabulary), footnotes and endnotes (citations, commentary, and parenthetical information); the development of central ideas, positions, and claims in texts — how informational texts develop a central idea through supporting details, facts, and examples; how argumentative texts establish and develop a claim through evidence, reasoning, and appeals (logos: logical reasoning and evidence; ethos: the author’s credibility, expertise, and fairness; pathos: emotional appeals that connect with the reader’s values, beliefs, or feelings); assessing the credibility, objectivity, and reliability of sources — applying CRAAP test criteria (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose) or SIFT (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims) to evaluate sources; distinguishing between primary sources (original documents: speeches, novels, diaries, data), secondary sources (analysis and interpretation of primary sources: literary criticism, textbooks, review articles), and tertiary sources (indexes and bibliographies); recognizing confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and anecdotal evidence as threats to objectivity; evaluating the relevance, importance, and sufficiency of supporting evidence, examples, and reasons in argumentative texts; identifying logical fallacies (ad hominem, straw man, false dichotomy, slippery slope, appeal to authority, hasty generalization, red herring); identifying accurate and objective summaries of texts — a valid summary captures the key ideas of a source without distorting, omitting critical information, or inserting the summarizer’s own opinion; interpreting graphic features (charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, timelines, photographs) and explaining how they support, extend, or complicate the written text; analyzing rhetorical devices and techniques used to achieve an author’s purpose (anaphora, antithesis, allusion, rhetorical question, parallelism, chiasmus, irony, hyperbole, understatement [litotes], personification, synecdoche, metonymy).

Literary analysis: genres, literary devices, structural elements, and authors’ engagement with social issues:characteristics of major literary genres — fiction (short story, novella, novel): narrative structure (Freytag’s pyramid: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), character (protagonist, antagonist, flat/round, static/dynamic), setting (physical, temporal, and social), conflict types (person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. society, person vs. nature, person vs. fate), point of view (first person: intimate but limited; third-person limited: one character’s perspective; third-person omniscient: all-knowing narrator; second person: rare, creates immediacy); drama: acts and scenes, stage directions (reveal setting, action, and mood), dialogue (reveals character and advances plot), soliloquy (a character speaks alone, revealing inner thoughts), aside (spoken to the audience or another character, unheard by others on stage), dramatic irony (the audience knows something a character does not); poetry: lyric poetry (expresses personal emotion or meditation), narrative poetry (tells a story: ballads, epics), dramatic poetry (a character speaks in the poem); sound devices: rhyme (end rhyme, internal rhyme, slant rhyme), meter (iambic pentameter: 5 iambic feet of unstressed-stressed syllables per line; Shakespeare), alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds), assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), consonance (repetition of consonant sounds), onomatopoeia (words that imitate sounds); figurative language: simile (comparison using “like” or “as”), metaphor (direct comparison), extended metaphor (sustained throughout a passage or poem), conceit (elaborate and far-fetched comparison), personification (giving human qualities to non-human things), apostrophe (addressing an absent person or abstract quality), synesthesia (mixing sensory descriptions), oxymoron, paradox; the contribution of literary devices to meaning, point of view, purpose, and tone; analyzing structural elements in fiction, drama, and poetry; the denotative (dictionary), connotative (associative and emotional), and figurative meanings of words and phrases and their effects; how word choice (diction) affects meaning, tone, and mood; analyzing the development and interaction of plot, setting, and character; analyzing how authors have explored significant social, cultural, and political events and issues throughout their writing — this is a distinctive feature of the 6–12 exam: candidates must understand how literary texts engage with historical and social contexts, how authors position themselves toward the issues of their time, and how to analyze texts through multiple critical lenses (historical/biographical, sociological/Marxist, feminist/gender, psychological, reader-response, new criticism/formalist, postcolonial) — major literary movements and their social contexts (the Harlem Renaissance and racial identity; the Lost Generation and WWI disillusionment; the Romanticism movement and industrialization; the Naturalism movement and social Darwinism; the Modernist movement and fragmentation; the Postmodern deconstruction of grand narratives; the Civil Rights literature movement; contemporary diverse voices challenging dominant narratives).

40q

60 minutes

Largest testlet

Testlet 219

Writing, Research, and Multimedia Texts (6–12)

The writing process, writing craft, and argumentation: processes for planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing texts — the writing process is recursive: writers cycle through these stages rather than following them in a strict linear sequence; prewriting (brainstorming, clustering/mind-mapping, freewriting, outlining, research gathering — generating and organizing ideas before drafting); drafting (translating ideas into a first draft, prioritizing content over conventions); revising (improving the substance, organization, and clarity of what is said: adding missing evidence, removing tangential material, strengthening transitions, reorganizing for logic and effect); editing (correcting grammatical, mechanical, spelling, and punctuation errors: comma splices, sentence fragments, run-ons, subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers); publishing (sharing the finished work with an appropriate audience in an appropriate format: essay, blog, speech, multimedia presentation, school literary magazine); structures and purposes of argumentation, informative, and narrative writing: argumentative writing (claim/thesis + evidence + reasoning + counterargument/rebuttal; distinguishes argumentation [based on reason and evidence] from persuasion [may use emotional manipulation]); informative/explanatory writing (explains, describes, or informs without taking a position; organized around subtopics); narrative writing (tells a story or recounts an experience using narrative techniques: dialogue, pacing, description, reflection); selecting and maintaining appropriate style, tone, voice, and diction for the genre, purpose, and audience; academic English conventions — the formal register of academic writing (complete sentences, third-person point of view in most formal essays, avoiding contractions and colloquialisms, precise and specific word choice, hedging language in academic claims); introducing and supporting claims in texts — an effective thesis/claim is specific, arguable, and significant; evidence types (quantitative data, expert testimony, anecdote, example, analogy) and their relative strengths; introducing evidence with signal phrases and commentary explaining how the evidence supports the claim; anticipating and responding to potential questions, concerns, and counterarguments — the concession-refutation structure (“While some argue X, this view overlooks Y because...”); logical appeals (logos), credibility appeals (ethos), and emotional appeals (pathos) balanced appropriately; using effective and varied transitions to create coherence and signal logical relationships between ideas: addition (furthermore, moreover, in addition), contrast (however, nevertheless, on the other hand), cause-effect (therefore, consequently, as a result), elaboration (specifically, for example, in other words), conclusion (in sum, ultimately, to conclude); using dialogue, details, sensory language, and reflection in narrative writing (show-don’t-tell: revealing character and emotion through specific action, dialogue, and sensory observation rather than direct statement).

Research, source use, media literacy, and multimodal presentations:developing research questions — effective research questions are focused and specific (not too broad: “How does social media affect society?” vs. specific and arguable: “How has Instagram’s algorithmic curation contributed to body image dissatisfaction among adolescent girls in the United States between 2015 and 2025?”); locating relevant sources and information — evaluating databases (JSTOR, ProQuest, EBSCO, Google Scholar), library catalogs, and government and institutional websites vs. less reliable general websites; Boolean search operators (AND, OR, NOT) for database searching; evaluating primary vs. secondary sources; assessing the credibility, objectivity, and reliability of sources using the SIFT method (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims, quotes, and media to their original context); properly attributing sources through paraphrasing (restating in one’s own words and sentence structure with attribution), summarizing (condensing key ideas with attribution), and direct quotation (reproducing exact language in quotation marks with full citation); understanding plagiarism (using others’ ideas or words without attribution, including patchwriting — making minimal changes to source language while keeping the structure) and academic integrity; citation formats: MLA 9th edition (works cited page; in-text citations with author and page number: Smith 42); APA 7th edition (reference list; in-text citations with author and year: [Smith, 2022]); ways in which components of media can be manipulated to alter or misrepresent information — understanding media manipulation techniques: selective framing (choosing what to include and exclude; point of view imposed through camera angle, cropping, and context), misleading statistics (cherry-picking data, confusing correlation with causation, using raw numbers vs. rates, using unrepresentative samples), false equivalency (treating two unequal sides as equally valid), deepfakes and AI-generated media, edited audio and video (taking statements out of context), misleading headlines (clickbait designed to elicit emotional responses that the article body does not support), astroturfing (creating the appearance of grassroots support when there is none); analyzing the effect of media on public opinion and how to be a critical media consumer; organizing multimodal presentations (effectively combining written text, images, video, audio, and data visualization to communicate a unified message); incorporating various media into presentations (selecting media that genuinely supports and extends the central message rather than merely decorating it; understanding copyright and fair use in the context of student and classroom work).

35q

45 minutes

Medium testlet

Testlet 220

Language, Speaking, and Listening (6–12)

Vocabulary, word structure, reading strategies, and fluency: general academic vocabulary (Tier 2: high-frequency words used across disciplines — analyze, significant, evaluate, contrast, demonstrate) and content-specific vocabulary (Tier 3: domain-specific technical terms — protagonist, iambic pentameter, rhetorical device, allegory); syntactic rules, word structure, and contextual analysis for vocabulary development — morphological analysis: understanding how prefixes (un-, mis-, pre-, dis-, anti-), roots (vid/vis: see; port: carry; rupt: break; dict: say; scrib/script: write; spec: look; bene: good; mal: bad; voc: voice), and suffixes (-tion, -ment, -ful, -less, -ize, -ify) combine to create and modify word meaning; syntactic analysis: using grammatical structure and the relationship between clauses to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words from context; contextual analysis: using surrounding text to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar word through context clues (explicit definition, restatement in apposition, example, synonym, antonym, general context inference); etymology: using word origins and historical development to understand meaning; research-based strategies to use before, during, and after reading a text: pre-reading strategies (KWL chart: what I Know, what I Want to know, what I Learned; activating prior knowledge; previewing text structure through headings, subheadings, and graphic features; making predictions from the title, cover, and key words; setting a reading purpose); during-reading strategies (annotating and note-taking; monitoring comprehension and re-reading when meaning breaks down; asking self-monitoring questions: “What does this word mean? What is the author’s purpose here? How does this connect to what I already know?”; making inferences; visualizing; identifying main idea and supporting details); post-reading strategies (summarizing: identifying the key ideas and restating them concisely; synthesizing: connecting information across texts or with prior knowledge; questioning the author: evaluating the author’s choices and their effectiveness; discussing and writing in response to the text); constructing meaning from multiple types of texts (literary texts: poems, plays, novels, short stories; informational texts: essays, news articles, technical documents; argumentative texts: op-eds, position papers, debates; multimodal texts: websites, infographics, videos, podcasts); the components of reading fluency: accuracy (decoding words correctly), rate/automaticity (decoding without conscious effort, freeing cognitive resources for comprehension), and prosody (reading with appropriate expression, phrasing, and rhythm that reflects understanding of meaning); research-based fluency interventions for secondary students: repeated reading, reader’s theater, audio-assisted reading, wide reading programs.

Language acquisition theories, cognitive and social processes, factors in language use, and oral communication:major language acquisition theories at the depth expected for secondary English teachers: behaviorist/operant conditioning theory (Skinner): language is learned through imitation, reinforcement, and practice; children are positively reinforced for correct utterances and corrected for incorrect ones; discredited as the primary explanation for first-language acquisition (Chomsky’s critique: children produce utterances they have never heard; they correct themselves without reinforcement; the timescale of language acquisition cannot be explained by conditioning alone); nativist/innatist theory (Chomsky): the Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is an innate neurological mechanism that enables language acquisition; Universal Grammar (UG): all human languages share deep structural principles (hierarchical phrase structure, recursion, etc.); the existence of a critical period for language acquisition (before puberty, first-language acquisition is remarkably uniform regardless of input quality; after the critical period, native-like proficiency in a second language becomes increasingly difficult); social interactionist theory (Vygotsky): language acquisition is fundamentally driven by social interaction with more capable speakers; the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) applies to language learning: what learners can accomplish with scaffolded support but not yet independently; private speech (Vygotsky’s concept: children use language to guide their own thinking and problem-solving — “egocentric speech” according to Piaget, but purposeful self-regulation according to Vygotsky); cognitive-developmental theory (Piaget): language development follows and depends on cognitive development; children can only acquire the language that maps onto concepts they have already developed; the symbolic function emerges in the preoperational stage (ages 2–7) and enables language use; specific cognitive and social processes that affect language development: joint attention (the shared focus of two individuals on an object or event — a prerequisite for word learning in infancy); intention reading (understanding what a communicative partner intends to communicate); pattern recognition (abstracting grammatical rules from linguistic input); working memory and phonological loop (the ability to hold and manipulate language in short-term memory — critical for reading fluency and vocabulary acquisition); executive function (cognitive control, including inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory — supports reading comprehension); social motivation (the desire to communicate and be understood); the role of various factors in adolescents’ and young adults’ language use: peer influence and language change (adolescents use language for social identity construction; peer group membership shapes vocabulary, slang, and discourse norms; adolescent language is often innovative and leads language change); digital communication and its impact on written conventions (texting language, emoji, GIFs, and multimodal communication creating new literacy norms; the importance of teaching code-switching — the ability to shift registers for different audiences and contexts); home language vs. school language (students who speak a home language or dialect different from Standard Academic English may experience linguistic insecurity; effective teachers validate home languages while explicitly teaching the codes of power); facilitating and participating in collaborative academic discussions (planning for productive discussion: clear objectives, shared text or data, structured roles); discussion protocols: Socratic seminar (open-ended, text-based, facilitated inquiry; the teacher’s role is to ask probing questions rather than supply answers), Fishbowl (inner circle discusses while outer circle observes and evaluates, then roles switch), Think-Pair-Share (individual reflection, paired discussion, whole-group sharing), Structured Academic Controversy (students argue one side, then switch and argue the other), Philosophical Chairs (students physically move to positions representing their view; promotes civil discourse on contested issues); wait time (research shows 3–5 seconds of silence after a question significantly improves the quality and length of student responses); incorporating effective language styles, rhetorical devices, and verbal and nonverbal techniques into oral presentations: vocal techniques (volume: can everyone hear?; pace: varied to signal importance and maintain attention; pitch and tone: conveys attitude and emotion; pausing: used to signal transitions, create emphasis, and give the audience time to process); nonverbal communication (eye contact: builds trust and engagement; posture and body language: open posture conveys confidence; gesture: used purposefully to illustrate or emphasize rather than as nervous habit; facial expression: aligned with the tone of the message); rhetorical devices for effective oral presentation: anaphora (repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses — “I have a dream...I have a dream...I have a dream”), tricolon (three parallel elements: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”), antithesis (contrasting ideas in parallel structure: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”), rhetorical question (a question not requiring an answer, used for emphasis).

25q

30 minutes

Shortest testlet