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To read and comprehend well requires students to develop their thinking about reading and to engage in close reading.

Common Core State Standards Reading Anchor Standard One requires students to “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.” This is what it means to comprehend a text.

This notion of close reading is related to Walter Kintsch’s model of reading that builds a text base. (1998, 1988, 1974) The key evidence of comprehension is that students can cite textual evidence to support inferences drawn from a text. When students can do that, then they have comprehended the text.

Students do not only need to learn how to determine whether a text is worth reading, but also how to take ownership of a text’s important ideas. Such reading is associated with taking notes or highlighting a text as you read, much as college students do when they are reading to prepare for an examination. However, because this kind of reading is necessary for comprehension, it must be taught and used at every grade. In this and the future posts, we will focus on some of the fundamentals of close reading. We will explain what it means to think through a text and use the theory of close reading.

Close Reading, not to be confused with CLOZE Reading, is an instructional routine in which students critically examine a text, especially through repeated readings. It allows kids to examine the deep structures of a piece of text. These deep structures include the way the text is organized, the precision of its vocabulary to advance concepts, and its key details, arguments, and inferential meanings. These deep structures must also include consideration of the author’s purpose, how these ideas connect to multiple texts, and the ways the reader can consolidate this information to formulate opinions.

The main purpose of a close reading is to allow students the opportunity to integrate new textual information with their existing background knowledge and prior experiences to expand their schema or thinking. Another purpose is to build the habits of a good reader when they engage in a complex piece of text. These include building stamina and persistence when confronted by complex text. Kids also need to build the habit of bringing in their own background knowledge when there isn’t someone prompting them to do so.

In our next post, we will continue to examine Close Reading. Here are a few suggestions to get you started until then. When reading:

1. Set a clear purpose for reading. “Read to find out…” “Read to compare….” “Read to confirm …” “Read to learn…” or read to answer questions “how, why, when, who, etc.”
2. Stop frequently to paraphrase—put the words on the text in your own words. If you can’t do it, reread.
3. Carefully connect chunks of text—words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs—to build a coherent understanding. Focus on words that make the relationship explicit—pronouns, conjunctions, adverbial phrases—and words that transition from one idea to the next.
4. Pay attention to the meanings of words, not only the literal, but also the metaphorical. Focus particularly on words that are domain specific or that seem to represent important concepts.
5. As you read, ask and answer questions like these: “What is the writer saying here?” “How does the information in this paragraph (sentence, chapter) change or add to what was said earlier?” “Why is this important?” “Whose perspective is represented in this text?” “What evidence is the writer providing for this claim?”
6. Be aware of text structures—both genre structures (narrative, argument, informational) and mid-level structures (cause/effect; problem/solution, comparison/contracts; definition/example, and claim/evidence).