Close Reading Explained For Teachers In Addition To Students

Close reading is an essential survival science especially straight off that nosotros alive inwards a data-saturated public where nosotros are constantly bombarded past times all forms of textual too non-textual stimuli. At its core, unopen reading is a metacognitive practise that allows you to plough over a deeper agreement of complex texts. It is a methodically analytical procedure that aims at deconstructing both the surface too deeper meanings of a text through a unopen analysis of its language. Close readers pay attending to syntax, dictionary too linguistic cues that tin dismiss aid uncover the implicit import of a textual output.

Related: Critical reading checklist

According to PARCC (2011 cited inwards Hinchman too Moore, 2013),

Close, analytic reading stresses engaging alongside a text of sufficient complexity straight too examining its pregnant thoroughly too methodically, encouraging students to read too reread deliberately....[It] entails the careful gathering of observations almost a text too careful consideration almost what those observations taken together add together upward to. (p. 6)

As an analytical skill, unopen reading, in ane trial developed, enables students to thoroughly engage alongside complex texts across dissimilar content areas. It’s a Swiss knife alongside multifunctions. Students tin dismiss utilisation it to read scientific discipline texts, analyze canonical literary texts, or uncover the hidden assumptions embedded inwards an online textual advertisement. As Johnson et al (2013) argued, reading a text closely “involves analyzing the unfolding of all text dimensions, including language, form, argument, too ideologies inside texts, emphasizing the detail over the full general (Fisher & Frey, 2012; Richards, 1929)” (p. 111). The purpose of unopen reading is to strip the text of all of its meanings too position its ‘bones’. In doing so, students depict on both textual too contextual cues to formulate a grounded agreement of the deeper meanings of the text.