yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Interpreting text features | Reading | Khan Academy


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hello readers! Today I'm going to be talking about text features, which is to say the parts of a text that aren't just words. We look at text features to get a better understanding of what the text is all about. Although they're not words, like I said, text features help our reading comprehension.

So what's a good example of a text feature? Well, let's start with, uh, say a map. Maps are a great example of a feature of the text that isn't made up of words. So this is a social studies textbook; this section is about Egypt. I've turned to this page where there is a map. What is this map of? Well, we can look at this part here; this text here over on the side is a caption. It's something that can tell us about an image, and the map is labeled. So it's about the Nile River and how the Nile River is fed from rainfall to the south. The water travels to the north; here's Egypt up here.

Don't focus too much on the details of this being about the Nile and stuff. Really what we're talking about is here is an image. There is a caption next to the image. Reading the caption helps us understand what's in the image, and looking at the image helps us understand what's in the caption. So we've got maps, we've got images, and that can be illustrations, photos, blueprints—anything really.

If we go back to our social studies textbook, we can see here there's this image. Just looking at the image on its own, we might not be able to tell what that is exactly, but again, there is another helpful little caption over to the side that says, "This is an aerial view of the Nile." So now we know what this is, and that can help ground us as we go through the rest of the text, which is also, I assume, about the Nile River and ancient Egypt.

The caption and its picture are two halves of a whole; they're both helping you understand the other. Other useful text features include charts, diagrams, and graphs, which can include things like timelines. This page here has a table; you can see up at the top, this top row is labeled "Ancient Egypt," and then on the left, we have all the different periods of Egyptian history. On the right, all the dates associated with those periods.

There's also a timeline in this lesson, and this one has a bunch of different text elements, right? So we have, it's not a traditional looking timeline, but you can see that it's arranged from top to bottom, oldest to most recent. Those are just some of the many options that are available to you when you look at a text.

Remember that when you're reading a passage, it's not just the words; it's everything on the page. Sometimes I even like to familiarize myself with the charts or the diagrams or the images on the page before I start reading—before I really get down to the business of reading the paragraphs. Because that helps me get rooted; it helps me anchor myself in what the text is going to be about. I look at the pictures, I skim the captions just to say, "Okay, what's going on here? Cool, we're talking about rivers, we're talking about ancient Egypt. I'm ready!"

Building those skills of readiness and being able to anchor yourself in any text that you encounter is what's going to make you a strong reader. You can learn anything.

Dave it out.

More Articles

View All
How Much Does The Internet Weigh?
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And this strawberry weighs about 50 grams, which according to Russell Seitz also happens to be the weight of the entire Internet. What does that mean? I mean, the Internet is a gigantic place and how do you measure information? …
Science Is an Error-Correcting Mechanism
So getting back to good explanations, where do these explanations come from? There’s currently an obsession with induction. Induction being the idea that you can predict the future from the past. You can say, “I saw one, then two, then three, then four, …
A monopsonistic market for labor | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
So let’s continue with our conversation around factors of production for a firm, and we’re going to focus on the labor market. So we’ve already drawn axes like this multiple times, where our horizontal axis this is the quantity, quantity of labor that’s …
BANNED Sega Ads!!!: Mind Blow 8
Meat flavored water and Japanese robot babies will someday rule the earth. Vsauce, Kevin here. This is Milo. Hey, it’s Mario. This is actually a Nintendo parody found in Sega’s Alex Kidd. But Nintendo paid the favor back in Donkey Kong Country 2 by stick…
Chicken Powered Steadicam - Smarter Every Day
Hey, it’s me, Destin. You remember I made the chicken head tracking video? The reason the chicken’s head stays stable is something called the vestibulo-ocular reflex. One thing that kept popping up is people always had the suggestion of making a camera st…
Definite integral of trig function | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So let’s see if we can evaluate the definite integral from ( \frac{11\pi}{2} ) to ( 6\pi ) of ( 9 \sin(x) \, dx ). The first thing, let’s see if we can take the anti-derivative of ( 9 \sin(x) ). We could use some of our integration properties to simplify…