Praxis II Free Study Guide

It’s difficult to cram for a test that covers such a wide variety of material, but there are several resources that you can review that will help to refresh your memory and fill in some gaps. If you’re more confident about your knowledge and preparation, your test-taking experience will be much more pleasant.

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Table of Contents

1. Test Question Format
2. Content Overview
3. Study Guide
4. Helpful Resources

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Test Question Format

The Praxis II English Language, Literature and Composition: Content Knowledge exam is comprised of 120 multiple choice questions. You are given two hours (120 minutes) to complete the exam, so you can count on having about one minute for each question. The test is structured similarly to the SAT and Praxis I that you took–it is contained in a sealed test booklet and acocompanied by a Scantron (”shade in the bubble”) sheet.

In general, each question is in reference to a statement or short passage (several lines to several paragraphs in length). No more than about two or three questions apply to each short passage, so if you really get hung up on a passage, move on to the next. If time remains, come back to any passages that you felt were tricky.

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Content Overview

The test’s title is fairly accurate. You must have a fairly strong grasp on the English language, English literature (including American, British, and world), and writing.

In order to assess your knowledge about these categories, the test includes three main question types: those that assess your ability to read and understand text, those that test your knowledge about the history and structure of the English language, and those that test your knowledge about writing.

More specifically, the questions are broken down as follows:

It is strongly recommended that you consult ETS’ “Test at a Glance” Bulletin (PDF) for more information about test format and questions.

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Study Guide

You should be very familiar with the information below. While all of it the literary concepts are “fair game,” if you are pressed for time then you may want to focus on the literary terms and genres first, followed by the major texts’ synopses, and the literary movements/periods last.

Also, be certain that you have a good sense of grammar and mechanics. If you have time, visit the university Writing Center to peruse the study guides that have for the Praxis I. Most of the material covered by the Praxis II questions was also on the Praxis I. The Writing Center has several binders/study guides with very clear examples and explanations of major grammar and mechanics issues.

Literary Terms to Memorize
You can expect many of the following to be on the exam. It is recommended that you become familiar with all of them, since they will probably be used at least once as an answer or option. According to IUP students who have taken the Praxis II already, the terms in boldface are some of the most common that appear repeatedly throughout the test.

• Apostrophe
• Antagonist
• Antithesis
• Anastrophe
• Aphorism
• Anticlimax
• Aphorism
• Apocalypse
• Archetype
• Blank verse
• Biography
• Burlesque
• Caricature
• Caesura
• Catastrophe
• Catharsis
• Conceit
• Cliché
• Connotation
• Consonance
• Closet drama
• Couplet
• Denotation
• Denouement
• Diction
• Discourse
• Epiphany
• Epilogue
• Exposition
• Figure of speech
• Free verse
• Foreshadowing
• Grotesque
• Hyperbole
• Inversion
• Memoir
• Metonymy
• Motif
• Metaphor
• Mock heroic
• Monologue
• Onomatopoeia
• Oxymoron
• Overstatement
• Paradox
• Parallelism
• Persona
• Personification
• Plot
• Quatrain
• Rhyme Royal
• Sarcasm
• Scansion
• Satire
• Soliloquy
• Sestet
• Setting
• Sprung rhythm
• Spenserian stanza
• Stock character
• Strophe
• Stream of consciousness
• Superego
• Symbol
• Synecdoche
• Terza Rima
• Villain
• Zeugma

Literary Genres to Memorize
You can expect nearly all of the following to be on the exam, so strive to become VERY
familiar with them!

• Drama
• Comedy
• Tragedy
• Tragic-comedy
• Playwright
• Novel
• Prose
• Short story
• Allegory
• Epic
• Ballad
• Pastoral
• Epistle
• Essay
• Myth
• Romance
• Fable
• Poetry
• Sonnet
• Legend
• Elegy
• Lyric
• Metaphysical poetry

Major Texts’ Synopses
You should refresh your memory or learn about classics that you may not have covered in your literature survey courses. You can do this in one of several way. Some students scan their anthologies and textbooks. Most read the plot summaries/synopses of the major literary works at Spark Notes (literature, poetry, and drama) or the free book notes at BookRags. While it is advisable to peruse all of the summaries at Spark Notes or BookRags, you may not have enough time.

If you are pressed for time or cramming, then it is VERY STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that you at least read the synopses of each work on the list below. Most of these titles consistently appear on the exam. If you work straight through without interruption, you can probably familiarize yourself with every one of these major works on Spark Notes within about 90 minutes.

Anonymous - Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice

Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage

Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers

Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays

Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies

Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World

Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House

James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The American
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior

Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild

Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved

O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm

Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep

Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels

Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Literary Movements/Periods
The major literary movements and periods can be subdivided into three categories: American literature, British literature, and world literature.

For each movement or period, know

1. a few facts about the time period (time span and major events like wars, plagues, migrations, etc.)
2. the major and minor authors
3. recurring themes, motifs, and concepts
4. how the period or movement compares to other periods or movements

American Literature: Colonial period Revolutionary period Civil War Romantic period Twentieth Century Modern era Realism American drama American novel American fiction American poetry Native American literature African American literature Latino/a literature

English Literature Old English period Medieval period Renaissance and Elizabethan Seventeenth Century Eighteenth Century Romantic period Victorian period Twentieth Century

World Literature Caribbean literature Russian literature European literature Ancient Greece Ancient Rome African literature (colonial and post-colonial)

You may either read the list below or follow this link to a printable version of the study guide. The answers have NOT been provided for you, but the next section (Helpful Resources) can help you find most of what you need.

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Grammar & Mechanics
If you’re not already comfortable with the following concepts, you should research their meanings before the test. Also, if you have any major weaknesses in the following area, learn how to recognize them and correct them. Many universities and colleges have writing centers with, at the least, tutors; some even haves binders with diagnostic exams so that you can assess your own strengths and weaknesses in many of these areas. You can also view the online resources at the bottom of the page.

• Sentence structure (syntax)
• Sentence types (simple, compound, complex, compound/complex)
• Subject-verb agreement
• Run-on sentences, including fused sentences and comma splices
• Pronoun antecedent agreement
• Fragments
• Faulty predication
• Parts of speech
• Kinds of nouns (common, proper, concrete, abstract, collective)
• Conjunctions
• Modifiers
• Kinds of verbs (transitive, intransitive, linking, auxiliary)
• Tenses (present tense, past tense, future tense, present perfect tense, past perfect tense, future perfect tense).
• Distinguishing a verbal from a verb
• Kinds of verbals (infinitive, participles, gerunds)
• Pronoun case
• Phrases
• Clauses
• Effective sentences
• Punctuation (comma, period, question mark, semicolon, exclamation point, apostrophe, colon, quotation marks, dash, parenthesis, brackets, hyphen)
• Capitalization rules
• Denotations & connotations

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Helpful Resources Your most helpful study materials will come from former American and British literature anthologies (if you didn’t sell them back after each semester), as well as the websites below.Suggested Texts:
Although most of what you need can be found online, the book below is essentially a complete, thorough, and efficient study guide for the Praxis II. It contains nearly every single term and genre, as well as key information about the major literary movements and periods, in a concise text.

Barton, Edwin J., and Glenda A. Hudson. A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms with Strategies for Writing Essays About Literature. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

Suggested Sites:

The links below may not be routinely updated, so be prepared to use a search engine to find any information you need.

Literary Terms: Literary Terms 1 Literary Terms 2 Literary Terms 3 Literary Terms 4 Literary Terms 5 Literary Genres: Major Genres and Subgenres General Literary Movements: General Literary Movements 1 American Literature: American Literature 1 American Literature 2 (Early lit.) American Literature 3 (Twentieth Century & the Modern Era) American Literature 4 (Twentieth Century & the Modern Era) American Literature 5 (Postmodernism) Native American Literature 1 British Literature: British Literature 1 World Literature: African American Literature Caribbean Literature Contemporary & Postcolonial World Literature Latino/a Literature 1 Latino/a Literature 2 Ancient Greek Literature 1 Ancient Roman Literature 1 Grammar and Mechanics: Grammar 1 Grammar 2 Punctuation 1 Grammar and Punctuation 1

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Created by Jamie M. Lee
Copyright © 2005 All rights reserved.