Reading Strategies and Text Features: Navigating Texts
What you must understand
This domain asks how you approach a text and how you use its features to find and organize information. Before reading, preview the title, headings, and any bold words to predict what is coming. While reading, ask questions, visualize, reread confusing parts, and summarize each paragraph in a few words. After reading, retell the important points in order. Text features in informational texts include headings, captions, bold and italic words, bulleted lists, diagrams, tables, and glossaries. Each one has a job: a heading tells the topic of a section, a caption explains a picture, bold print signals an important term, and a table organizes facts for comparison. Text structure matters too: compare and contrast, cause and effect, problem and solution, sequence, and description each use signal words.
Traps to watch for
- Skipping the features: questions often ask what a heading or caption tells you, and the answer is often not repeated in the main paragraphs.
- Confusing the jobs of features: a caption describes a picture; a heading names a section; a glossary defines terms.
- Mixing up structures: a passage listing steps is sequence, not cause and effect.
- Misreading a table: read row and column labels before choosing a number.
- Answering from memory of the topic instead of from the passage's own features.
Worked example
A passage has the heading "How Bees Communicate" and a caption reading "A scout bee performs a waggle dance." Asked what the caption does, the answer is that it explains what is happening in the picture. "It states the main idea of the whole passage" is wrong, because that is the heading's broader job, not the caption's.
Rule of thumb
Preview, then read with a purpose. When a question names a feature, go straight back to that feature and ask what its specific job is.