MTEL Vocational Technical Literacy Skills Test Breakdown

Reading

Meaning of Words and Phrases: recognition of common words, unfamiliar words, words with multiple meanings and words used incorrectly, and synonyms and antonyms.
Main Idea and Detail: identification of main concept and supporting details and various summaries, outlines and graphic representations.
Writer’s Purpose: audience, point of view and intended meaning and using word choice, phrasing and content to understand the written piece.
Idea Relationships: order of events, cause and effect, making generalizations and drawing conclusions.
Critical Reasoning: evaluating the logic and identifying mistakes, relevance of facts and examples, recognizing fact from opinion and determining credibility, objectivity and bias.
Graphs, Tables and Charts: recognizing, interpreting and drawing conclusions from written data represented in graphs, tables and charts.

Writing

Unity and Focus: word choice, organization, shifts in viewpoint, distracting or irrelevant information, topic sentences and support for the main idea.
Use of Verbs and Nouns: standard use of subject-verb agreement, verb tense and consistency of tense and plural and possessive nouns.
Use of Pronouns and Modifiers: standard use of antecedent agreement, cases, possessive, relative and demonstrative pronouns and adverbs, adjectives and prepositional phrases.
Use of Sentence Structure and Punctuation: sentence fragments and run-on sentences and identifying incorrect or unneeded punctuation and when punctuation has been left out.
Use of Capitalization and Spelling: standard use of initial capitalization, capitalizing proper words and titles and spelling commonly used words.