English Language Arts and Reading.1.10.C

The student is expected to

discuss with adult assistance the author's use of print and graphic features to achieve specific purposes;

author's purpose strand teks talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Author's purpose and craft: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts. The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.

Ask students why they think the author included certain pieces of the text or graphics while students are reading a text in a whole-group or small-group context. Some text features to highlight include table of contents, glossary, headings, subheadings, bold or italicized words, pictures, diagrams, graphs, and charts.

Notes:

  • Adult assistance can be provided. The adult can point out specific parts of the text to help students. For example, a teacher might say, “On this page, there is a diagram of how a pumpkin is created. It shows us the pumpkin going from a seed, to a plant, to a pumpkin. Why do you think the author included this diagram instead of just telling us with the text?”
  • Students should be encouraged to note the use of print and graphic features used to achieve specific purposes in both digital and non-digital texts.
Print and graphic features are parts of a text that draw the reader's attention to important information. Print features are the use of words to explain something in the text (e.g., titles, bold and italicized font, headings, subheadings, captions, glossary, table of contents). Graphic features are pictures, visual aids, or other images within a text used to support that author’s purpose and message (e.g. graphs, diagrams, charts, timelines, bullet points).