READING06L23: Interpreting Glossary and Index
OBJECTIVES
1. Distinguish a glossary from an index
2. Interpret a glossary and an index
3. Get information from a glossary and index
LESSON PREREQUISITE
LESSON PROPER
Text Features in Books
These are a useful set of tools that will help students interact with
information from readings or text selections to find extra textual
information.
Table of Contents
The page after the title page and the publisher’s information is usually the table of contents. It presents the title of each chapter and the
corresponding page number. Some have subtitles for subsections which
the author uses to organize the text.
Glossary
Often, especially in a student textbook, words that appear in the glossary
will be bolded, underlined, italicized, or even highlighted in color. As the
age of the student and the difficulty of the text increase, glossary words
will not be emphasized in the text. Instead, the student is expected to
know to look for unfamiliar vocabulary in the glossary.
Glossary entries are very much like dictionary entries, and generally
supply the definition of the word used in context, references to related
terms, and a pronunciation key. Although the author may provide
secondary definitions, students should understand that even when only
one meaning is listed, there could always be more.
It is similarly important that students learn that even with multiples, only
one should be chosen to make sense of the word in context. Index
The index at the end of the book helps students find information in the
body of the text or book.
For instance, when researching for a paper, students need to know how
to use an index to find information in a text. Students need to
understand that when they have read a text and can’t recall specific
information, that information can be found by using the index.
Students must also understand how to use synonyms and related words
to find the information they are looking for. They may not know that, when learning about signing the constitution, they should look first for
“constitution” in the index, and then hopefully find “signing” as a sub-entry.