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.

In the book A Close Look at Close Reading, Grades K-5, the authors state that an effective close reading activity requires that the teacher develops challenging, text-dependent questions, models closely reading text, and differentiates for students who need extra support. There are a variety of models that can help a teacher develop good text-dependent questions, but the most important aspect of any question is that it requires the reader to go back into the text to find the answer. A

n excellent way to ensure students understand any activity or assignment is for the teacher to model the behaviour they wish to see. Close reading requires that the text being read is a challenging text, and many students in the classroom will struggle because of that. The teacher needs to make sure that the lesson is differentiated so that all students can be successful and build towards independence. 

Good text-dependent questions always require the reader to go back to the text to find their answers. “Text-dependent questions differ from the kinds of questions students may be used to answering in response to a reading in that they do not focus on personal connections to the text, but rather require that students focus explicitly on what the text itself has to say.” (64)

Close reading is the practice of reading a short passage multiple times to get additional information out of the text. Good text-dependent questions should help foster that practice by getting the students to reread the passage to gain greater insight into the text.

A helpful way to get students to scaffold their reading to get them thinking progressively deeper about a text is to go from questions around general understanding, to key details, vocabulary, text structure, author’s purpose/message and finally inferences. While this might not always be a necessary progression, each type of question can help ensure understanding on the part of the reader before they move onto typically more challenging questions.

Even some of the non-text-dependent questions on page 66 can be made text-dependent by adding a second sentence with “how does the text answer this question?” or “where in the text do you find support for your answer?” Text dependent questions, at their best, force readers to think deeply about the text. 

Modeling closely reading text is similar any other teacher modeling of an activity. The teacher will model how they wish their students to complete the close reading by reading the text themselves, thinking aloud about the purpose of the close reading, and modeling any notations they wish to see their students use as they do their own close reading.

It’s important that the teacher model going back and rereading the text to ensure understanding and to find answers to the text-dependent questions. Students are better able to complete assignments to the level teachers expect when they both hear the expectations and see those expectations modeled. 

Differentiation is a process whereby the teacher provides additional scaffolding for some students to allow them to be successful with the close reading activity. Any differentiation should have as the end goal student independence on the activity. The suggestions in the chapter “Planning, Teaching and Managing Close Reading” in A Close Look at Close Reading, Grades K-5 fails to provide much beyond the tried and true “I do, we do, you do” model of gradual release, sentence stems, and a rather staid 4-square word cards for vocabulary acquisition.

While each of these have their uses, none are going to lead to student engagement and independence. Nothing was mentioned about finding engaging texts for students or modeling the activity in small guided reading groups before moving to the whole class, both of which have in my experience much better success in developing independent engagement with all students.