Composition Interventions

By developing a clear understanding of figurative language, students can further comprehend texts that contain metaphorical and lexical meanings beyond the basic word level. In this lesson, students explore figurative language with a focus on the literal versus the metaphorical translations of idioms. Through read-alouds, teacher modeling, and student-centered activities that are presented in the classroom, students will further develop their understanding of figurative language.

This unit is based on the trajectory of early language and second language development, and uses poetry as a medium through which to build early language and literacy skills in the elementary grades. Through reading, analyzing, and performing poetry, young students will learn about sound devices that make poetry fun to read, and in turn these sound devices will help teach the students skills they need to be successful speakers and readers.

In this lesson about literary devices, students first assess their prior knowledge of common literary devices. Students create acrostic poems of literary device terms and Gallery Walk the created acrostic poems. Students summarize their knowledge by evaluating how comfortable they are with each literary device.

"There are hundreds and hundreds of literary devices, so in this article, I’ll go over the most common ones, and when you should use them."

Students are more likely to understand, recall, and care about what an idiom means after having played with the phrase through a highly engaging exploration of metaphorical language. Eye on Idioms can be used to engage students in a study of seven idioms. After viewing the literal representation of each idiom, students are asked to complete the sentence by selecting the correct idiom from the list. Using context clues from the sentence, students can then determine the metaphorical meaning of the idiom. As a final step, students are asked to use the idiom in a sentence to show their understanding of its meaning. Students should be reminded to print the page after completing each idiom exercise since their work cannot be saved electronically.

This fast and fun lesson will help you enhance your writing with these elements of figurative language.

Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to understand figurative speech, which relies heavily on metaphor. This article explores why metaphors challenge learners and presents ways to incorporate metaphors into EFL instruction to help learners understand figurative speech. Topics discussed include cognitive metaphor, environmental metaphors, and culture-based metaphors.

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. The study suggests that reading, discussing, and evaluating mentor texts can have a positive impact on the quality of children's independent writing.

A speech teacher describes how she helped her students use literary devices in their writing.

This resource describes literary terms for a literary analysis.