CHAPTER 5 Scaffolding Close Reading of Academic Te...
Scaffolding Close Reading of Academic Texts
Recent scholarship on disciplinary reading calls on students to develop new language capacities that enable them to read, write, talk, think, and reason like historians, scientists, mathematicians, literary scholars, and other disciplinary experts. An important avenue for developing these new language capacities is close reading, a method originated in literary criticism that encourages students to grapple with complex disciplinary texts by examining their words and sentences thoroughly and methodically through deliberate reading and rereading. This chapter reviews existing models of close reading practices and describes how a register-based functional linguistics approach (i.e., functional grammar analysis) can support close reading of academic texts in a unit study on the American Revolution aimed at developing students' historical literacy.