5.2 Instructional Models of Close Reading

5.2 Instructional Models of Close Reading

One way to provide reading support for students is through a method that has long been emphasized in China but only recently became prominent in American schools as a result of the release of the Common Core State Standards. The method is called close reading, which bears striking resemblance to what is widely known as "intensive reading" (精读) in China's English education circle. Originated in literary criticism, close reading is "a method of reading literary texts that involved detailed analytical interpretation as if the words on the page spoke directly and profoundly to the reader" (McCormick, 1994, p. 34). It requires deliberate, thorough, and methodical analysis of words, sentences, paragraphs, visuals, and larger units to explore their significance in the text. In the context of reading instruction, close reading is "an approach to teaching comprehension that insists students extract meaning from text by examining carefully how language is used in the passage itself" (Snow & O'Connor, 2013, p. 2). During close reading, students engage in intensive analysis and close examination of a text through repeated readings in order to understand its main ideas and key details, its craft and structure, and its voice/style.

Several models of close reading have been proposed for classroom implementation. One such model was articulated by Hiebert (2013), who viewed close reading as involving an investigation of a brief piece of text with multiple readings. Specifically, she recommended the following elements for teaching close reading:

·　make students responsible for the first reads of texts,

·　ask purpose-setting questions to help students focus on important points,

·　encourage students to reread critical parts of texts and to support their interpretations with textual evidence,

·　conduct lessons on key vocabulary words prior to reading,

·　talk explicitly with students about the role of challenge in learning, and

·　help students develop comprehension strategies to use.

Like Hiebert, Shanahan (2012) also believed that re-reading is essential because complex texts do not give up their meanings easily. He advocated conducting close reading through a series of three readings of the text. In the first reading, students read with the intent of being able to retell or give the key ideas about the text. In the second reading, students take a step further to consider how the text works, answering questions such as "how did the author organize the text?" "what literary devices were used and how effective were they?" "how were data presented?" "why did the author choose this particular word?" and "was the meaning of a key term consistent or did it change across the text?". Finally, in the third reading, students go even deeper to consider the message the author is conveying, how the message connects to other works or to the reader's own life, and the quality of the evidence presented. Students are expected to be able to answer questions such as "what does this text really mean?" "what does it have to say to me about my life or my world?" "how do I evaluate the quality of this work?" and "how does this text connect to other texts I know?". According to Shanahan, this model features an intensive analysis of a text in order to come to terms with what it says, how it says it, and what it means.

Fisher and Frey (2012) described a similar protocol for teaching close reading that has become perhaps the most influential model in reading instruction. The model involves

·　teacher selecting a short but suitably challenging text;

·　teacher establishing the purpose for reading by identifying the content and language goals for the reading;

·　students reading, re-reading, and annotating the text two times, with the first reading focused on figuring out the gist of the text and gaining an overall sense of the flow of information and the second reading on lesson objectives;(https://www.daowen.com)

·　students discussing with one another about their first impressions and confusions;

·　teacher reading aloud the text to model thinking process and problem-solving strategies;

·　students discussing the passage in small groups with a focus on text-dependent questions related to general understanding, key details, vocabulary, text structure, author's purpose, inferences, opinions, arguments, and intertextual connections;

·　students rereading the text to locate information or provide evidence in response to specific questions; and

·　students engaging in performance tasks that can include a Socratic Seminar, a debate, or writing from sources.

They emphasized that teachers should preread and gain familiarity with the text prior to its use for instruction so as to identify elements of the text that make it challenging and worth close reading, determine the appropriate amount of background knowledge building, develop text-dependent questions to pose to students, and choose the right strategies that support students' interaction with the text (e.g., using shorthands or Wikki Stix for note taking).

These models of close reading emphasize asking text-dependent questions (i.e., questions that can be answered by reference to the text being read) and seeking answers to these questions through multiple readings and discussions. They generally do not encourage the use of any pre-reading activity that builds readers' background knowledge because frontloading is feared to grow into "something contradictory to good sense" (Shanahan, 2013, p. 8), such as excessive background preparation that gives away the meaning of the text, thus undermining the value of close reading. The models provide useful frameworks for getting students to engage directly with complex texts. They are particularly appropriate for those who are capable of processing complex texts but may need guidance in focusing on what is important in the text. However, they offer few details on how teachers can provide linguistic support that striving readers and learners of English as an additional or foreign language often need in the reading and rereading of complex texts. Although explicit reference to aspects of language and text organization is made in some of these models, ideas for systematic exploration of the linguistic and discursive features of text are exiguous.

Moreover, while the models suggest some helpful questions to answer during reading and rereading (e.g., right-there questions, think-and-search questions, author-and-you questions), they do not provide information on how to go about generating or answering these questions in a systematic way. Simply reading and rereading a text multiple times, asking a series of questions, and discussing these questions in groups do little to help those who are already struggling with the language of complex texts. Students, especially those who have had little prior experience with academic texts, need tools for independently unpacking the often dense, abstract, metaphoric language and the strategically integrated visuals (e.g., pictures, symbols, and graphs) of disciplinary texts in order to gain access to the concepts, ideas, values, arguments, and worldviews presented in these texts (Fang & Schleppegrell, 2008). They need not only to learn how to ask thoughtful questions while reading, but also to develop skills and strategies for making sense of the text and answering these questions independently. To this end, an emphasis should be placed on developing students' capacities for text exploration during close reading, helping them notice and analyze language patterns in terms of their forms, structures, logic, meanings and functions in the text, as well as their effects on comprehension and interpretation.

Other models of close reading overcome these limitations by foregrounding the role of language in meaning making. These models promote explicit attention to the lexical and grammatical patterns in academic texts and offer concrete strategies to help students cope with these patterns. Fillmore and Fillmore (2012), for example, described a method for providing English language learners instructional support that enables them to learn how language works in complex texts. This method recognizes that the language used in complex texts of academic disciplines differs in many ways from the language of ordinary talk. It involves close reading of complex texts on topics in such content areas as science, social studies, history, and English language arts. Central to the method is a daily instructional session (15-20 minutes) in which the teacher leads students in analyzing and discussing one "juicy" sentence drawn from the text the class is working on. This sentence is usually "so complex it begs for explication, is grammatically interesting, and is focused on an important point in the passage" (p. 6). An example of juicy sentence comes from Martin Luther King Jr.'s (1963) "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me. Through unpacking sentences like this, one clause, phrase, or word at a time, students are expected to develop an awareness of the relation between specific lexis or grammatical structures and the functions they serve in the text.

Unlike Fillmore and Fillmore (2012), whose model is based in traditional grammar, Rose (2005) developed a model of close reading, called "Reading to Learn" (or R2L), that is informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The model is divided into three stages: preparing before reading, detailed reading, and writing. In the first stage, the teacher reads aloud a text —narrative, factual, or analytical — as students follow along, and then provides an oral summary of the overall sequence of meanings (e.g., elements of plot, key ideas) in terms all students can understand. This emphasis on general understanding of the text and text structure is meant to provide a foundation for the key stage of detailed, or close, reading. In other words, some frontloading is seen here as a helpful preparation for, rather than an unnecessary impediment to, close reading of challenging texts. During detailed reading, the teacher guides students to read a short passage from the text, sentence-by-sentence, identifying wordings within each sentence and then elaborating their meanings in greater depth and detail. Passages selected for close reading are usually the ones containing rich language resources with which students are less familiar and which they can apply to their own writing. In this stage, students are expected to read the text with full comprehension and accuracy and to develop knowledge of a repertoire of lexical and grammatical resources for building tension in stories, construing technicality and abstraction in factual texts, or evaluating issues and critiquing texts in persuasive essays and text responses. In the third stage, students write a new text in the target genre using the relevant language resources gleaned from detailed reading.

Fang and Schleppegrell (2010) described a similar model of close reading that involves more systematic analysis of lexical, grammatical, and discursive patterns in the text. The model, described in Chapter 3, is called functional grammar analysis. It offers a set of linguistic tools that enables readers to answer text-dependent questions related to content, organization, and perspective. To explore what the text is about, students analyze each clause by identifying the relationships constructed in the nouns, verbs, and other elements of the clause. To explore how the text is organized, students analyze what begins each clause, how clauses are combined, and how cohesion is calibrated. To explore how the author infuses judgments and points of view, students analyze word choices. Functional grammar analysis offers teachers a potent vehicle for engaging students in detailed, thoughtful, and critical reading, providing them insights into genre- and discipline-specific ways of making meaning and infusing ideology through language.

Taken together, these models suggest that best close reading practices involve multiple readings and discussions, careful attention to lexicogrammar as a creative meaning-making resource, purposeful writing as a way to deepen conceptual understanding and expand linguistic repertoires, and the use of text-based evidence to support answers to text-dependent questions. These elements are believed to be central to the goal of developing engaged readers who are able to comprehend, compose, converse about, and evaluate complex texts in thoughtful, critical ways.