Page 62 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

beyond literal meaning. By asking questions before, during, and after reading, students are able to make
connections between their own life and the life of the story. Summarizing and making generalizations
supported with examples from texts encourages deep processing that is essential to developing language
skills.

Learning to interpret story elements such as plot, theme, characterization, setting, and point of view will
help students understand the building blocks of a story and allow them to identify how an author uses
structure and language to convey meaning across a wide variety of genres.

Take a look at the chart below to review some key terms before we discuss these story elements in
further detail.

Element Definition
Plot The sequence of events that take place in a story. There are
five components to plot: conflict, rising action, climax,
denouement, or falling action, and resolution.

Theme The underlying message of the story. Theme is closely related
to main idea but is usually more global in scope.
Characterization, plot, setting, and point of view all contribute to
a story’s theme(s).
Character Characterization is made up of three elements: appearance;
personality, and behavior.
Setting Time and place. Details that describe setting might include
weather, time of day, location, landscape, and even furniture. All
of these things can contribute to the understanding of a scene.
Point of View Point of view refers to the narrator of the story. The most
common points of view are first person, third-person limited, and
third-person omniscient.

What Makes a Story?

At the heart of every story is the plot, or skeleton—the sequence of events that takes place from
beginning to end. There are five components to plot:

• Conflict: the inciting incident, what begins the story
• Rising action: the events created by the conflict
• Climax: the highest point or turning point of a story
• Denouement or falling action: where the conflict becomes unraveled
• Resolution: how the conflict is resolved

Writers vary plot structure depending on the needs of a story. These basic elements are the building
blocks of narratives and can be found in every story.

One way to have students learn simple story structure is to familiarize them with a wide variety of fairy
tales,fables, myths, folktales, and legends as these stories tend to be linear in nature and contain
predictable outcomes that will allow students to recognize how an author uses plot to frame sequential
events.

Let’s take a look at how the elements of plot combine to create in the classic tale “Rumpelstiltskin.”