Welcome to Unit 1, Language Focus, Previewing Texts. In this video, we will discuss how to preview informational texts about scientific research. The main job of most scientist is to do research. Research is the careful study done to find and report new information about something. Some of that research is done through their own experiments. But a lot of the research is done by reading about other people's ideas or experiments and there is a lot to read. In fact, there are so many written texts about scientific research, we don't have time to read all of them completely. So how do we know which ones might be the most helpful for us without having to read everything word for word? We preview the text. That means we quickly look through our source before we give it a full reading. It helps us quickly learn what a text is about and improve our understanding. Previewing is a really great way to prepare to learn something new. Let's try previewing a reading that we will do later in this course. We will preview the text in four steps. Looking at the title, the pictures and the captions, subheadings, and the first paragraph. Let's get started. The first thing we look at is the title. In this example article, the title is Salting away renewable energy for future use. We need to ask ourselves a very important question, what do I already now about this topic? For example, we may see renewable energy and think this is about a new type of energy that we won't run out of like the wind or the sun. Or perhaps, we can't make a guess and that's okay. In any case, by looking and thinking about the title, we're learning about the article in preparing to understand it better. Next, we look for pictures and their captions. A caption is the words or sentences right below a picture that gives more information about the picture. In scientific text, you'll also find text captions under other figures such as tables, charts and graphs, together with the title. Pictures and the captions can help us make a guess about the overall idea of the text. This process, using small pieces of information from previewing to make a guess about something in the whole text is called predicting. Let's look at one picture and caption from our example text to try out the strategy. We see a drying of what looks to be some type of system. The caption for this picture says sunlight heats salt to power steam generators to produce electricity. The caption explains that this is a drawing of how this new renewable energy system works. It uses sunlight to make salt that is under the ground, very hot. That creates steam and the steam is the power needed to make electricity. In addition to pictures, we should pay attention to any subheadings in the text. Subheadings are small titles that introduce different sections of the text. In our text, we see the subheading, how does it work? We can predict that the text will explain how the system makes electricity. Now, comes our last step in previewing text. Informational text often give the most important information, first. So let's look at the first one or two paragraphs. We see two phrases, how to store electricity from the sun and uses molten salt as a medium for long-term energy storage. Even if some of these words are new for us, we should be ready to combine what we know about the title, the pictures, the captions, and the sub-headings to predict the main idea of the text. The main idea is the overall, general message of the text. In our example, we could guess that there is a new system for storing energy that uses sunlight and salt. To summarize, we previewed a text by looking at the title, pictures and captions, subheadings and first paragraph. We thought about what we already know about the topic and predicted the main idea of the text. After previewing, we can decide if we want to read the text more carefully. If we choose to read the text, previewing has prepared us to understand the text much more successfully. Next, we will play a short game about previewing.