During small-group instruction, students put highlighting tape on all the words in a passage that have a prefix. Which of the following reading strategies are the students working on?

Syntax awareness refers to understanding the rules and structure of sentences, including word order and grammatical relationships. While highlighting words with prefixes may indirectly support sentence comprehension, it primarily focuses on word structure rather than the arrangement of words within sentences. Thus, this choice does not directly address the skill being practiced.

Visual cues involve using imagery or symbols to aid in understanding text. Highlighting words can be considered a visual cue, but the primary focus in this activity is on analyzing the prefixes of the words. Therefore, this choice does not capture the essence of the reading strategy being employed, which is more about understanding word formation than just using visual aids.

Context clues refer to using surrounding text to infer the meaning of unknown words. While students may use context clues to understand words they encounter, the task of highlighting prefixes is specifically about word structure rather than deriving meaning from context. This makes context clues an irrelevant choice in the context of the highlighted strategy.