Kuunari

A year ago I read the book A Close Look at Close Reading: Teaching Students to Analyze Complex Texts, Grades K-5 by Barbara Moss, Diane Lapp, and Maria Grant. This book was disappointing, never naming race or rarely discussing multilingual learners. It did explain what close reading is clearly, and as a tool, it has it’s place in a complete language arts classroom. I’ll be posting the essays for the next 11 weeks on Tuesday.

Close reading is an important tool to help students to be able  to critically analyze texts. The authors of A Close Look at Close Reading provide the following description of close reading: “Close reading is a particular way of approaching a text in order to uncover, engage with, and understand the information and ideas it contains.” (47) They then go on to expand on that definition by describing five attributes of close reading: detecting, authenticating, determining, evaluating, and arguing. Using close reading allows students to develop as readers and should be used at least once a day and throughout the curriculum, not just in language arts. 

Close reading is a reading experience that is unlike many traditional reading lessons. The teacher chooses a short, challenging text and does not do a lot of front-loading of the content the students will need to understand the text. The students will attempt to read this text on their own, developing their grit and problem solving ability within reading. Then, the students will reread the text multiple times utilizing questions from the teacher, to draw out as much information and inferences as they can. At the end, the students will do some form of activity to show their learning or understanding. 

The purpose of close reading is to “gain insight into what the text says, how the message was constructed, and the author’s intent.” (50) Students are “taught how to make complex text comprehensible.” The purpose of close reading is to prepare students to be able to read to learn. In the past, there has been an assumption that once a student achieves a certain reading level, they can automatically switch from learning to read to reading to learn. Close reading gives all students the tools they need to be able make that transition to reading to learn. Particularly for struggling readers, they need to be given tools that allow them to access and engage with grade level texts, even if they aren’t yet able to read fluently at that level of text. Close reading systematizes this to promote deep thinking and analyse about text. If students aren’t able to transition from learning to read to reading to learn, they will struggle in class settings throughout the rest of their academic career and will likely find roadblocks to success in their career.