Objective:

This lesson reviews text features and how they are used to help you preview and read informational passages with more understanding. Text features organize and highlight key information, provide definitions or additional information, and focus on important information the writer wants to convey to the reader. They act as a preview to what you will be reading.

Text features include titles, headings, and other divisions, table of contents, indexes, glossaries, prefaces, appendices, captions and graphic features.

In this lesson you will:

• review examples of text features,
• practice using (applying) your understanding of text features,
• score and evaluate your answers.

Vocabulary Review:

Key text features are defined under Tips and Tools. As you need review later in the lesson, you will also find definitions under the Tools tab, then open Vocabulary.

Tips and Tools:

Three ways to understand how these text features work to organize information are to:

1. review definitions and examples (you will do that in Tips and Tools)
2. practice identifying elements as you read (lots of examples and practice follow the definition review)
3. be aware of text features and ask questions while you read. Be active in your reading and notice the titles, captions with pictures, headings, and any other clue to help you understand what you read.

Titles, headings and other information divisions tell you what the article is about.

Like a billboard on the highway, a movie preview, an announcement or advertisement, or like main headings in an outline, titles, headings and other information divisions tell us what the article is mainly about by giving us a map to the article's information.

When you pick up an article, first read the title, subtitles, headings, and any other information divisions, such as highlighted words at the beginning of paragraphs. You'll have a good idea what the article is about, and give your brain a stretching work-out at the same time.

When titles and headings are in your brain, you have already set up a place to connect, file and make sense of new ideas when you read. Knowing something about your topic is a powerful learning tool. Titles, headings and other divisions give you a head start on the information you are about to read.

The table of contents is included at the beginning of complete books, lengthy texts, magazines or any other large document. It gives you an overview of the entire document by listing each chapter, article, or section. Table of contents helps you locate major topics in a large document.

An index is a detailed, alphabetical listing of all the important topics appearing in the book, magazine, or lengthy document. It usually contains many more listings than the table of contents, and will help you locate information you need about a specific topic, and tell you on which page the information can be found. The index is usually at the end of a book.

A glossary is a mini-dictionary, with definitions of words found in the book. It is an alphabetical listing of technical terms, foreign words, or special words, with an explanation or definition for each.

The preface (might be called forward or introduction), is a short section before the table of contents which gives you an idea of what the book is about and why it was written. It also acts as a preview of the material in the book or article.

The appendix is an extra informational section after the body of the book. It might include charts, maps, tables, diagrams, letters, copies of official documents. These supplemental documents relate to the information in the book, and often add meaning to the information in the text.

Captions and graphic features may appear throughout a book, document, article, or any written passage. They supply a visual picture of information important to the article.

Example 1 >>