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9th grade · English Language Arts · Unit 7 of 12

Forms & Features

Text patterns, visuals and media

What your child practices

Knowing what each text form does, how features such as an index, footnote or caption help readers, how signal words show a text's pattern, and how images, color and design shape meaning.

Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards benchmark: 9.1.5.2; 9.1.5.3 · informational text structures and the use of graphics and media

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. Text forms have jobs: a script has dialogue and stage directions; an epistolary text is told in letters.
  2. Headings guide readers, footnotes add sources or notes, captions explain images.
  3. Signal words show patterns (because, in contrast, first). Images, color and design shape meaning too.

Example: A story is told in letters between two characters. What is this text form called? “Epistle” is an old word for letter. A text made of letters is epistolary. Answer: an epistolary text

Forms & Features in Minnesota

In the Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards, this is unit 7 of 12 in 9th grade English Language Arts, after Digital Smarts and before Summarizing Texts.

Gradelings describes a child's practice on this unit as Beginning, Approaching, Meeting or Exceeding (Four practice steps). That reflects practice, not a report-card mark: the teacher decides the mark.

Source: Minnesota Department of Education (MDE)

Sample questions

A taste of this unit. In the app, questions change every time and get easier or harder to match your child.

  1. Question 1

    Which statement about cultural text forms is accurate?

    • Oral stories cannot be analyzed
    • Songs and art are never text forms
    • Only printed books count as real texts
    • Some communities share knowledge through spoken stories, songs and art, and these are valid texts

  2. Question 2

    A bar graph in a news article is mainly used to…

    • show and compare data at a glance
    • list the sources alphabetically
    • give the author's biography
    • tell a story with characters

  3. Question 3

    What does a caption do?

    • Replaces the title of the article
    • Lists the author's sources
    • Shows where the page ends
    • Explains or adds information about an image

  4. Question 4

    Which text form is made up of dialogue and stage directions?

    • A news article
    • A biography
    • A script
    • A recipe

  5. Question 5

    Two news sites report the same event with different headlines. What is the most likely reason?

    • They have different purposes or target audiences
    • Only one of them is a real website
    • Headlines are chosen at random
    • One of them has no photos

  6. Question 6

    What is the purpose of a heading in an article?

    • To act as a caption
    • To tell what a section is about and help readers navigate
    • To end the text
    • To list the author's age

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