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Classroom Practice:
Close Reading
Classroom Practice:
Close Reading
Intended Purpose:
Intended Purpose:
To encourage students to read and reread deliberately, focusing on the meaning of individual words and sentences, the order of sentences, and how ideas develop throughout the text. Close reading leads students on a cognitive path that begins with establishing the text's literal meaning and ends with exploring its deeper meaning.
Benefit for LTELs
Benefit for LTELs
By intentionally designing close reads that require at least three readings, you are building students' habits of inquiry and investigation of complex texts. Students demonstrate this habit when they begin asking themselves and others questions about the text:
What does the text say?
How does the text work?
What does the text mean?
What does the text inspire me to do?
Close reading is an opportunity for teachers to apprentice students through each step of the metacognitive process, thinking aloud and showing students what successful readers and writers do. Teachers focus on teaching and supporting students to recognize and replicate different academic discourse patterns, understand how academic text is structured, and focus on conceptualizing and framing ideas.
ELD.PI.1 Exchanging information and ideas with others through oral collaborative discussions on a range of social and academic topics
ELD.PI.2 Interacting with others in written English in various communicative forms (print, communicative technology, and multimedia)
ELD.PI.6 Reading closely literary and informational texts and viewing multimedia to determine how meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly through language
ELD.PI.11 Justifying own arguments and evaluating others’ arguments in writing
ELD.PII.1 Understanding text structure
ELD.PII.2 Understanding cohesion
SL.1 Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively
Use Content Standards for the conversation.
For Example, for the linked Hammurabi Code formed, you would use the following HSS standards:
6.2 Students analyze the geographic, political, economic, religious, and social structures of early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Kush.
4. Know the significance of Hammurabi’s Code.
9-12 Analysis Skills - Chronological and Spatial Thinking 3 – Students use a variety of maps and documents to interpret human movement, including major patterns of domestic and international migration, changing environmental preferences and settlement patterns, the frictions that develop between population groups, and the diffusion of ideas, technological innovations, and goods.
Teacher Moves
Teacher Moves
Use a short but complex passage.
Provide students with a copy of the text that they can write on. When possible, provide text in students’ home languages.
After students’ first reading, paraphrase each sentence/chunk. Once Close Reading becomes a habit, you can guide students to paraphrase each sentence/chunk of the reading in pairs or trios.
Guide students through annotating the text.
Conduct a class discussion and analysis through the following question types:
What does the text say?
General Understanding
Key Details
How does the text work?
Vocabulary
Structure
Author’s Craft
What does the text mean?
Author’s Purpose
Intertextual Connections
What does the text inspire you to do?
Opinion with Evidence or Argument
Student Moves
Student Moves
Read the passage silently (can be in home language)
Annotate the text
Underline the major points.
Circle words or phrases that are confusing or unknown to you.
Use a question mark (?) for questions that you have during the reading. Be sure to write your question.
Use an exclamation mark (!) for things that surprise you, and briefly note what it was that caught your attention.
Draw an arrow when you make a connection to something inside the text, or to an idea or experience outside the text. Briefly note your connections.
Participate in class discussion.
Resources/ Teacher Examples
Resources/ Teacher Examples
Text-Dependent Questions, Grades 6-12 Pathways to Close and Critical Reading By Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Heather Anderson, Marisol Thayre
Question Type Guidance Adapted from Text-Dependent Questions, Grades 6-12
TEACHER EXAMPLE - The Code of Hammurabi Close Read
TEACHER EXAMPLE - The Code of Hammurabi Discussion Questions
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