According to The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) (which, coincidentally, is also one of two consortia that is creating the assessments that will be used to test CCSS)
Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately. Directing student attention on the text itself empowers students to understand the central ideas and key supporting details. It also enables students to reflect on the meanings of individual words and sentences; the order in which sentences unfold; and the development of ideas over the course of the text, which ultimately leads students to arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole.
This lens is useful because it emphasizes the need to slow down and attend to textual details in orderly way as a function of analysis. It seems to me that there are essentially two types of close reading: reading that focuses on craft and reading that focuses on concept, though often the focus on craft will lead to conceptual understanding. For example, imagine reading the second paragraph of the Declaration of Indepence, which has the famous Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness line. If I am focused on craft, I am looking at diction, parallelism and other techniques Jefferson used. If I'm looking at meaning, I'm looking at definitions of words, ideas, confluences and contradictions.
Adept readers do this as a matter of course, shifting between craft and meaning seamlessly. Emerging readers need explicit prompting and, in some ways, tricks to remember to read closely.
To that effect, these are generic but typical things my students do with a small piece of text. Be warned, though, that you cannot and should not attempt to have anyone read an entire novel or book closely. Choose excerpts, pieces of articles, or shorter pieces to practice. Choose questions or activities that force a student back into the text. It's not especially useful to know what a student thinks Happiness means or for him to describe a time when he was happy. If you are really checking the student's ability to understand the text, make the question text-based; ask instead what Jefferson meant by Happiness and ask them to back it up with details.
Quick and Generic Steps to Close Reading
Close reading happens after you have already read the text once. You don’t have to go in this order but you should always start with step 1 and end with step 7.
Step 1: What is your first understanding of the text? What would you say the text is about right now? What are the Big Ideas or what is the focus you find most compelling?
Step 2: Look for and mark interesting words that jump out at it you. If you were going to group them together and give that group a name, what would it be? Is there a pattern to the words? What is the author describing with these words?
Step 3: Divide the text into natural sections. Look for shifts. What is the purpose of each section?
Step 4: Examine the syntax. Is there anything interesting that this author uses? Do you see sentence variety? Is there a short sentence among long sentences? Are there plenty of questions? Repetitions? Parallelism? What is he emphasizing with this and why?
Step 5: What images are interesting? What do you picture? How are those images created (devices)? What is the purpose of these images?
Step 6: What’s the tone at the beginning? What is it in each section you have marked? What is the tone at the end?
Step 7: What new claims or ideas about the focus of the text do you have now that you have looked at it closely?
What are your thoughts? What ways do you get students to revisit text?
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