Close Reading #doctoralpursuit

Close reading is a critical analysis of a text that focuses on significant details or patterns in order to develop a deep, understanding of the text’s form, craft, and meanings. It has been used with secondary and college students in the past, but repeated readings of text in this way make it something that elementary students can do. Student examine and critically look at text and read and reread read, unlike shared reading though, students only read and reread a portion of the text to get a deeper understanding before they move on to explore more of that same text in a different portion.

With close reading, student learn structures of text like the way it is organized, considering the author's purpose and other advanced concepts like how to synthesize all information in the text.

Key Features of Close Reading:

• Short Passages
• Complex Text
• Limited Frontloading
• Repeated Readings
• Text-Dependent Questions
• Annotations

Close reading has routinely been used for secondary and for college level reading, so, how do we modify it for elementary school use?  The type of text that works best for close reading is one that is more complex and would require deeper thinking to understand. Since this is the case, the close reading would begin as a shared reading and the teacher would begin the reading of text aloud to the group. Earlier I mentioned one key feature of the close reading is limited frontloading--talking up information and key ideas in a text--the reason for limited this is to help the students come to authentic ideas and not teacher generated ideas. Background knowledge is critical for comprehension so, as the classroom teacher you will have to decide which information is necessary to discuss before student attempt to read the text alone. As you prepare the lesson, remember to create or use questions that the students will have to revisit the text to answer or to verify the answer for. This will help with the deep thinking and synthesizing. Teach the students how to, as Fisher & Frey say "read with a pencil'. They say you will have to teach your student to annotate--take notes while reading-so they can keep up with their thinking. Some literacy leaders like Stephanie Harvey teach students to do this with post it notes. For annotation to be effective for the students, you will have to teach them the importance of why it is done along with how it is done. The idea of close reading for elementary classrooms is fairly new and not a lot of research has been done, as professionals its a good idea to explore as many different ways we can create and cultivate deeper readers and writers.

Thank you for reading...

Painting by Pawel Kuczynski

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Close Reading In Elementary Schools. The Reading Teacher,
          66(3), 179-188. doi:10.1002/trtr.01117