MTEL Communication and Literacy Skills (01) Exam Secrets Study Guide: MTEL Test Review for the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure

If you removed the cover of this book, you would never guess based on the contents that this book prepares you for the MTEL 01 Communication and Literacy exam. In fact, I am assuming that the authors themselves have never even taken the exam. This book has nothing to do with the exam whatsoever. Instead, it teaches what literature is and spends a great deal of its pages dealing with fiction and literary devices. Just flipping through the book, here are some of the vocabulary words or topics that are taught in the reading section: analogy, express feelings, short stories, novels, novellas character, drama, dialects, soliloquies, asides, circular reasoning, table of contents, etc. It's just too painful to go on. The writing part of the book is just as bad.It looks like the author simply made a guess on what would be taught on an exam called communication and literacy and then just wrote something. Even more laughable, the very few parts of the book that are slightly relative (which I do not exaggerate to be somewhere around 5% of the book) are shockingly bad. For example, the difference between line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts is a description in paragraph format. I'm guessing this is simply because the word processing or printers were antiquated / too cheap to print an actual image. The back of the book proudly says, "Effective, Affordable, Guaranteed." without the person being quoted who made such a statement. I'm guessing much of the positive feedback has been left by friends and family.If you want to pass the exam, my advice is just go through the practice tests and read the exam test objectives too. It will give you accurate, relevant practice. If you find you need more practice, which you shouldn't, just find similar exams offered by different states and do the practice material for those.I hope this review will save your precious $40 to $60 dollars. It's the first time I felt totally robbed and cheated. Imagine buying a car for $40,000 dollars and then getting a plastic toy car in the mail. That is preciously what you get with this book. Huge disappointment.

The 2 practice tests in the back are probably the best part of this book. There are so many typos and errors in the written part, the publisher should be embarrassed, especially since this is for the C&L skills test! I found all the mistakes very distracting. Also, I'm not really sure how the preparation part is meant to help... it seems like one long run on sentence... put this through professional editing and it would be vastly improved.

The book has some very useful information about the format and content of the MTEL test and in general I really liked it. There are a few sections that could be improved with some examples. For example, definition of types of sentences or sentence structures, sentence classification are good but it would be much helpful if there were a couple of examples for each. Still, this book improved my general knowledge and level of readiness for the test I think. Thanks!

Most importantly, I passed.Honestly, the exam is pretty easy and most (myself included) should simply be able to pass by virtue of being college educated.This book did allow me to pinpoint a couple of areas of weakness to improve my odds. When paying $100+ to take an exam, why not improved your odds?

I have had an opportunity to review the MTEL Communication and Literacy Study Guide and it has helped me already in studying for the MTEl exam. I would recommend to anyone that needs the additional help with the exam.

This is NOT a Massachusetts specific book. This is a generic test study guide; they have changed the title to say MTEL but it offers no specific MTEL information. The practice tests on the MA website and the practice tests in this book are vastly different. For this price, steer clear.

I have found the material helpful. This has been a great resource and I feel confident I will do well on my exam. Very user friendly!!

I appreciate that the writers/editors have kept the book shorter with added features online. The information about the exam is comprehensive, and it's useful to have the example test at the end to practice what you've learned. The one minor drawback is the layout. There are long chunks of texts for multiple pages with minimal heading breaks. Including more graphics and pop-out boxes of information would make the text more appealing, but this is otherwise a great product.