Navigating a text

The purpose of the activity

The learners skim and scan a text to identify its structure, key ideas and some detail.

The learners find out about the text features that help readers to find information, such as the contents page, home page (on websites), index, glossary and hierarchies of headings and subheadings.

The teaching points

• Becoming aware of the different structural features within books, websites and other texts that can help to locate information quickly and efficiently.

Resources

• One or more texts, such as a unit standard workbook, textbook, webpage or magazine article.

The guided teaching and learning sequence

1. Select a suitable piece of text, which could be a whole book, long section of text, magazine page or website.

2. Prepare a list of questions the learners can answer by using supports in the text to find specific information, for example, by referring to the contents page or index or by scanning headings in the text.

3. When the learners have found answers to the questions, discuss the text features that helped them and the processes or pathways the learners used to find the answers.

Follow-up activity

The learners can work in pairs, taking turns to select a piece of text, write questions about it and answer the questions.