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 easy way to approach teaching students how to read across disciplines, including science, social studies, and mathematics, as well as the various genres in literature.  Within each discipline is important that students get chances to read multiple types of text. Both the Common Core and real world reading requires students to be able to read a variety of texts, particularly non-fiction, expository text. 

In the book, A Close Look at Close Reading, Grades K-5, the authors state that close reading across a variety of disciplines is essential for three reasons. First, it allows teachers to include literacy instruction throughout the curriculum and not just during reading instruction.  “Close reading also gives students practice mastering the ‘ways of knowing’ that are pertinent to each discipline.” (102)

This leads into the second reason for close reading, the modeling of literacy practices in different subjects. “Close reading of disciplinary texts gives teachers a way to model for students how to address the unique comprehension challenges associated with particular content within a particular subject area.”

My brother, who is a high school physical science and biology teacher, frequently laments students who enter high school without the skill to read and understand high school level science texts. As a K-5 teacher, it is my responsibility to provide my students with opportunities to develop the skill and capacity to read texts in a wide range of disciplines.

The final reason to use close reading across disciplines is to allow students more chances to acquire knowledge within a wide range of curriculum areas. With the increased curricular demands on teachers, being able to combine standards into one lesson allows for more coverage of the state standards in both language arts, and science, social studies, and mathematics. 

In the past, teachers have focused much of their reading instruction on fictional, narrative texts. This has left students unprepared for both the demands of the discipline specific classes as well as reading in the real world. “Even in the early grades, texts from the different disciplines are drastically different from one another, representing very different discourse forms.” (105)  The authors then go on to elaborate, “each genre has unique features, and reading comprehension is genre-dependent.” (105) 

Much of the text adults need to read in their jobs are functional or expository texts, and students need practice in reading these different text types. There are also many ways that literature texts can be including in other disciplines, such as reading a fictional book about refugees while discussing immigration. These cross-curricular activities allow students to have multiple onramps to the learning happening in the classroom.

In addition, many students find expository texts more interesting than narrative texts, and by providing students with more opportunities to read these texts it provides a way to engage students in close reading. The authors also encourage teachers to utilize the text exemplars suggested in the Common Core Appendix B. Close readings of a variety of texts provides many opportunities for cross-curricular learning and student engagement.