Close Reading
Instructional Routine
What is close reading?
• Close reading is an instructional routine in
which students critically examine a text,
especially through repeated readings.
• Close reading invites students to examine the
deep structures of a piece of text.
• . . . “x-ray the book for the skeletons hidden
beneath the covers.” (Alder, 1940)
Deep Structures
• The way the text is organized
• The precision of the vocabulary to advance
concepts
• Key details, arguments, and inferential
meanings
• Consideration of the author’s purpose
• How ideas connect to other texts
• Ways the reader can consolidate information to
formulate opinions
Primary objectives of close reading
• Afford students with the opportunity to
assimilate new textual information with their
existing background knowledge and prior
experiences to expand their schema
Primary objectives of close reading
• Build the necessary habits or readers when they
engage with a complex piece of text
▫ Building stamina and persistence when
confronted with reading that is not easily
consumable (Fisher & Frey)
▫ Developing the habit on considering own
background knowledge when there isn’t someone
prompting them to do so
Close Reading
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6.
The use of short, worthy passages
Rereading
Reading with a pencil
Noticing things that are confusing
Discussing text with others
Responding to text dependent questions
Short, worthy passages
• Constraining the amount of text helps students
see how to apply a skill or strategy and limits the
amount of time required to teach that skill or
strategy
• Consider the use of specific passages or chunks
from a longer piece of text that deserve a close
reading
Rereading
• Explicit and implicit levels of understanding
• Willingness to return to the text to read part or
even part of it more than once
Reading with a pencil
• The act of making notes helps us pay attention to
the text and allows us to return to the text later
when we want to provide evidence
• Reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking
tends to express itself in words, spoken or
written.
• Writing your reactions down helps you to
remember the thoughts of the author.
Annotations
• Underlining – major points, important
statements
• Vertical lines at the margin – emphasize a
statement or point to a passage too long to
underline
• Star, asterik, etc. – use sparingly to
emphasize the ten or so most important
statements
Annotations
• Numbers in the margins – to indicate a
sequence of points made by the author in
developing an argument
• Circling of key words or phrases
• Writing in the margins – to record questions
(and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in
your mind, to reduce a complicated discussion to
a simple statement, to record the sequence of
major points
Noticing confusing parts
• Annotations – use a question mark
• Identifying the specific parts of a text that are
confusing requires fairly complex thinking
▫
▫
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▫
Unknown word
Big idea the reader has never considered
Structure of the sentences
Text structure
Discussing the text
• Engage in purposeful talk
• Manage use of academic and domain-specific
language and concepts
• Provide an opportunity to learn with others
Asking text-dependent questions
• Text-dependent questions prompt readers to
return to the text
• Questions that can only be answered with
evidence from the text
• Questions should challenge the inferential levels
of meaning, such as mood and tone of text,
author’s purpose, or how word choice impacts
the quality of the reading
• Questioning routines – QAR, questioning the
author, Bloom’s-taxonomy oriented questions
Questioning the author
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•
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(Beck & McKeown, 2006)
What is the author trying to tell you?
Why is the author telling you that?
Does the author tell you clearly?
How could the author have said things more
clearly?
What would you say instead?
Close Reading Class Routine
1. Establish the purpose for reading with students
2. First reading: Students read independently,
teacher targets specific students who may need
more assistance, encourage all students to
annotate text and note confusing parts
3. First discussion: Partner talk to check meaning
4. Second discussion: Assessing for understanding
and confusions, students share partner
discussions, ask for words or portions of the text
that were confusing (this guides teacher for
modeling)
Close Reading Class Routine
5. Second reading: Teacher-led shared reading
and think aloud
6. Third discussion: Text-dependent questions
The purposes of text-dependent questions are to
prompt rereading, encourage the use of textual
evidence to support answers, and deepen
comprehension
explicit
implicit meaning
7. Journal writing
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