Close Reading

by Ken Scherpelz, VP, Sales & Business Development

When I first heard the term close reading, I was tempted to correct the speaker by asking, “Don’t you mean cloze reading?” referring to an old method of measuring a student’s ability by asking the student to determine a missing word from the context of a sentence.

Such was not the case.

Nancy Boyles, graduate reading program coordinator for Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven and author of six books on reading comprehension, defines it this way: “Essentially, close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension.” Through close reading, re-reading and careful observation, students can learn to find more meaningful levels of understanding from the text.

Lately the emphasis in reading comprehension has been on reader response; that is, trying to show how the reader is connected to the text, or how the reader feels about and responds to the text. Boyles feels this approach leaves the reader with the notion that the text was written only to stimulate his or her own feelings and thinking, and in doing so it tended to leave the meaning and purpose of the text “a distant memory.” Close reading provides the means to focus on the true, and sometimes complex, meaning of a text, which is really why the author gathered and arranged the words in the first place.

Definitions of close reading use phrases like “engaging with a text,” “a transaction between reader and text,” “careful and purposeful reading” and even “encountering a text.” These phrases imply a much more intimate connection between a student and a text than the process of simply reading the text once and completing a set of surface “who-what-where” comprehension questions.

Close reading, which can be used in elementary and high school classrooms, differentiates itself from typical reading for meaning by emphasizing reading and re-reading texts to go beyond the typical comprehension question for which there is only one answer. The goal is not to summarize what the author wrote, but rather to pick apart the text in order to look closely at the elements the author used to achieve a specific purpose. Those elements might include word choice, literary techniques, patterns, structural elements, and cultural and historical references

A good author uses different elements with a specific intention in mind, and close reading helps to uncover how the use of these elements achieved (or perhaps did not achieve) that purpose.

Grant Wiggins, president of Authentic Education, works with school districts, colleges, and state and national education departments on matters of education reform. Wiggins points out that students who meet the English/Language Arts portion of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) use the very tools and steps required for close reading, including:
• “analyz[ing] how and why individuals, events and ideas develop and interact over the course of the text”
• interpreting words and phrases in the text and analyzing how specific word choices shape the meaning or tone
• reading the text to make logical inferences from it and citing specific evidence in the text that supports conclusions drawn from the text
• analyzing the structure of the text to see how parts relate to each other and the whole

While reading teachers who are seeking to align their instruction to the CCSS may be initially pleased to see these obvious connections to close reading, they need to understand what is required of themselves and their students before jumping in and trying to use this method. Close reading requires a lot of practice and discipline. In fact, in some ways, students will need to “re-learn” how to read a sentence, a paragraph and even an entire book. Where students had been paying attention to factual detail in order to achieve a certain level of comprehension, close reading will now require that they pay equal attention to structure, word choice and other literary techniques in order to really understand the author’s purpose.

It will be interesting to see how reading comprehension scores change once more classrooms begin engaging in the close reading technique. For this movement to be successful, teachers will need training, practice and the ability to reconsider how they teach reading, as well as the ability to impart those same behaviors on their students when it comes to their reading.

Did You Know?
Close reading’s homonym, cloze reading, refers to a method that specifically trains students on context and vocabulary. The general idea of cloze reading*is to test a student by omitting a word or phrase from a piece of the text. This way, the student must not only analyze what word would make sense in context (thus honing in on vocabulary skills) but also associate the word with what he or she just read. A cloze cycle would involve “predicting,” “comparing,” “justifying” and “discussing”—all important to the comprehension process. Created by W. L. Taylor in the 1950s, the term cloze was shortened from the word closure, referring to the Gestalt psychology* term that describes the human tendency to complete familiar, unfinished patterns.

Fill-in-the-blanks are common in assessment, particularly on ELA exams, though cloze analysis specifically provides students with the chance to demonstrate their knowledge of syntax and semantic clues. By filling in the omission with a logical word or phrase, students display grasped concepts of grammar and meaning. Whether the approach is close or cloze, reading instruction has always been a crucial part of the education process, providing the foundations for communication and language.

* Note: Hyperlink points to PDF download. (DYK by Kate Carroll)