Text Features
Justification for the Text Feature Walk
It doesn’t matter if you are a teacher of one or more subjects; your end goal is to help students learn and achieve. Students are often taught strategies to help them teach and foster student learning. Strategie help students organize and reflect on information. In addition to having various strategies to assist with content learning, knowing how to navigate the text is extremely important. The key is to be able recognize and acknowledge the factors that might enhance or inhibit comprehension. There are three main types of factors: text elements, text organization and text content.
All components that make up a text feature are included in the article or story. This includes the index, table of contents, glossary and headings. If these features are clear and concise, they will be useful. However, they could be detrimental if they’re not well organized or are only vaguely connected to the content. Text organization refers specifically to the structures and patterns that the author uses to compose the text. By arranging information in a predictable way, a well-organized book is easier to read. Badly organized text is counterintuitive, and can hinder the ability of readers to understand it. The content of a text is what we want students to learn. If content is broken down into smaller chunks it will be easier to understand. But, it could be overwhelming if too much of the specialized academic vocabulary and abstract concepts are included.
Each of these aspects of expository texts is addressed by the text feature walk. Knowing and being able to discuss
Rationale For The Text Feature Walk
“>text features are key factors in the success or failure of the text-feature walk. The structure helps students anticipate what they’ll be learning. As part of a text feature walking, students are required to work as a group and read every feature according to its order. Then they discuss the information they have learned. Students must discuss and reflect on the relationship between each feature and the overall idea of the text as they read it.
The text structure and background information of a section is absorbed by students as they work through it (Honig, Diamond, and Gutlohn 2000). Some students may struggle to understand the meaning of unfamiliar content. The text features might help them make connections. They help students build mental models which increase comprehension, and improve their recall (Recht & Leslie 88). When students predict and talk about various features, it helps them to set their purpose and anticipate the content of their next reading.
To add to the many benefits mentioned, the text walk provides engaging structures that increase students’ learning interest and facilitate their comprehension of meaning. This active learning approach is essential for content and vocabulary learning (Kibby, Nagy & Scott, 2003; Rupley, Logan, & Nichols, 1998). Ruddell, (2009) suggested that students have the ability to “interact and transact” with text (p. 228). (2) Guide students as they learn in content areas. (3) Help students integrate reading and content learning. This text feature walks accomplishes all three.
How to teach students how to use the Text Feature Walk Structure
Select texts for which students have some background knowledge.
Allow students to not read and discuss too many pages at once.
Scaffold the pronunciation of new vocabulary words before students begin their discussion (sometimes multisyllabic words can intimidate students, even though they may have schema for the word or concept).
Discuss with students how they felt the text feature walk helped them understand the content.
Discuss with students the reasons designers and authors use text features. Spend a few weeks with students to help them identify and understand various text features before you start a text feature walk. The text features in the table below are quite common and among those you will want to directly teach to students. To be able to walk text features successfully, you must also have a good understanding of the text features. You want students to know how an interactive conversation is different from just talking about one text.
The Text Feature Walk Student Guide
You can choose to have one person start the text features by starting in your small group.
Name the text feature. Caption and picture? Map?).
The text feature is also read by the same individual.
Group discussion: Discuss your predictions, questions, connections and other information based on text features. Then, consider how this will impact the main idea. Everyone is welcome to contribute.
Share the next text feature with another person and then repeat steps 2 to 4. Keep going until you have covered all the features or your teacher is ready to call.
Speed finishers: Once you have reviewed all text features in detail, take some time to reflect on the content you have just read. What do you think you will learn? What do you think the main idea will be?
Use the Chart of Text Features
This free text features chart is a great reference for students because it:
The name of the text feature
Describes the intent of the text feature
Shows an example of the text-feature
There are many options for how to use the text features diagram. Post it up in your classroom and let students use it as reference. Or have students glue it inside their interactive notebooks.
Use this chart as a guide to help your students do a “text features scavenger hunt”. Have students read a book that is not fiction and find all of the text features.
You may like these additional text feature ideas or activities.
What Are the Objects of Text Features
Each text feature has a specific purpose in nonfiction material, while the overarching goal of every text feature is to quickly and easily gain access to information. Text features help you to quickly and efficiently read research texts. The index and table of contents allow readers to locate specific pages in a book quickly. This knowledge is easily accessed without the need to go through the whole book.
Many times information in the book is illustrated with photographs and captions. The bolded text is usually new vocabulary words, which are frequently defined in the glossary and mini dictionary at the back.
Lastly, visuals or data that match the information are often placed in graphs, charts, or diagrams. These three text features are very important because more often than not, the data is not actually written in the body of text. Nonfiction resources provide as much value for each text feature as they do the text. Combining text with text features provides information in a structured and organized format readers can access easily.
For students to learn how to use text features
Students should have the opportunity to learn about and use text features in every nonfiction material beginning in kindergarten. An easy activity for students aged five and under is going on a book scavenger search to discover text features. The younger reader can find bold words or photographs, while the upper-grade readers can fill out a checklist to locate every text feature within the book. We provide nonfiction resources so students can see how the text features are used.
Students can also create anchor charts of text features to further enhance this scavenger idea. The students may work with magazines or newspapers in pairs, or as groups to make each individual text feature. Next, students should arrange the pieces on poster board or chart paper and glue them together. Finally, label each piece. Thus, they are using a text feature to complete the assignment. Keep these child-friendly anchor charts on display for students to memorize each one.
Students must not only be able to recognize and understand the purposes of text features but also how they can be applied to their learning. A book or an article that deals with science, social studies or similar topics should be given to students. Students can use specific text features to complete tasks, such as using the glossary for the meanings of unfamiliar bold-faced terms.
Based on the title of each chapter in the table, or any headings within the text, students can make predictions about what they’ll learn. Students can also use paragraphs to help them think and create headings that match their content. You can have students create captions to accompany photographs and illustrations. Each student can be assigned a particular section, chart, or diagram of a text and given the task of being an expert for the information from that visual or text. They are responsible for conveying the information to their classmates.
Students will see the benefits of text features when they are taught to use them in nonfiction reading, research, or content projects. Students will then automatically look for text features in nonfiction material to aid their comprehension.
Teaching Strategies for Students to Explore CTE Programmes
You have probably been involved in education since a long time, particularly secondary.
What is Text Features? Below are the Six Most Common Text Features
This article may contain affiliate links. These links will earn us a small commission if we click them and you purchase. But, it does not impact our editorial content. To learn more, please refer to our disclosure.
Text Features refer to parts of a text but don’t necessarily appear directly within the main body. Text features, which are used often in nonfiction text like science and social studies texts, make the reading of the text more easy.
The most common areas for nonfiction text features are the index, table of contents, captions under pictures or diagrams, glossary terms, labels or features of graphs and charts, and bolded words.
Each text feature has its purpose but the overall goal of all text features is to quickly gain access to information in nonfictional material.
Nonfiction text features
Nonfiction texts often have many text options to assist the reader in understanding the story. Below is a listing of the text features that aid understanding.
Title- Tells us the title of the book
Glossary: This glossary defines the words in the book which might prove difficult
Bolded word – Words that have been defined or highlighted in the Glossary.
Captions – sentence describing a picture
Diagrams: Pictures with descriptions
Writing Workshop
Our nonfiction unit was taught simultaneously for writing and reading, to allow them to apply the information they had learned in Reading Workshop. They were eager to publish nonfiction books. It was important to choose a topic that they are knowledgeable about. They were very organized in the writing of their first nonfiction book. Our discussion focused on the characteristics of nonfiction books that we would add to our book. We included a title, a table of contents, chapter headings, and a labeled diagram. All of the students wrote their own book called All About Kindergarten. Together we came up with several chapters they could choose from, so each student’s book was a little different. Then they wrote a few sentences for each chapter and we all had a labeled diagram of our classroom at the end of the book. To finish, it took us around one week. The Pre-K children were invited over to the event, where our Pre-K students read their books about kindergarten. These were great times for our kids. Students were free to select a non-fiction topic to write about after writing the book. We made sure our students knew enough about their topic to write a book (a very short book) about it.
Alerts
Manage Content Alerts Add to Citation Alerts View References Alerts Abstract: Ways of individual style expression in a natural language include amongst other things stylometric features. Computati…
Stylometric and other features are examples of ways to express individual style in natural languages. The use of computational languages methods can detect these features automatically. This review will summarize recent studies that have been done on the extraction and application stylometric feature in solving tasks such as authorship verification and authorship verification. We discuss which stylometric function categories provide the most efficient solutions and the benefits they bring, as well as the drawbacks of some approaches that are based on them. Finally, we make recommendations for future research.
2019, 25th Conference of Open Innovations Associations
There are three types of text features.
To make the discussion easier, we have divided text features into three groups: supplementary and directional features.
What Are the 7 Types Of Text Structures You Can Use?
These text structures are: sequence/process. description. Time order/chronology. Proposition/support. Compare/contrast. Problem/solution. Cause/effect. Inductive/deductive.
What Are The 3 Most Important Text Features?
- Titles. A title gives the reader a preview of what they will be learning.
- Table of Contents. A table of contents provides a list of topics that are covered in the text, and where they can be found.
- Glossary or Index
- Sidebars.
- Pictures and captions
- Maps.
How Are Text Features Used?
The text feature helps you find important information in a document. You can determine the purpose of each feature by knowing its function. This will allow you to choose which text feature should be looked at when trying to get a better understanding of your text. It is organized by purpose to identify text features, and what they do for the reader.
.Text Features