Knowledge and Skills Statement
Use a variety of texts such as grade-level picture books or young adult texts that include illustrations. Generate a series of prediction questions based on text features such as the title, illustrations, and book cover as well as characteristics of genre and text structure. Ask students to predict what the text will be about and what type of characters might be present in a story. Students can answer the prediction questions during a class discussion, or they can be paired with another student.
Notes:
- Teacher-generated questions should be written so that students can be guided to generate a prediction.
- Students can also generate their own questions prior to reading and after the text has been introduced.
Further Explanation
This assessment item requires students to identify what they think the author wants to tell the reader. Initially, students use background knowledge and text features to make predictions with assistance. Students must be familiar with text features and characteristics of genre to understand what they may reveal about the text. A teacher may wish to assess predictions using a variety of text types.
Research
Kelly, M.J., & Clausen-Grace, N. (2010). Guiding students through expository text with text feature walks: The reading strategy in this article guides students in the reading of text features in order to access prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. The Reading Teacher. 64(3), 191–195. doi: 10.1598/RT.64.3.4
Summary: This article describes how to employ a text feature walk in the classroom and reports on the benefit from using this technique, including results from a pilot study in the spring of 2007. Text features include all the components of a story or article that are not the main body of text. The text feature walk is a structure that addresses each of these facets of expository text.