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University of New England

EDU 742: Study Skills and Content Literacy

Professor Linda Lacasse

March 30, 2025

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"The purpose of close reading is to focus on comprehension, making meaning through careful and thoughtful examination of the text" (Lent, 2016, p. 54).

According to Dr. Ray Reutzel, close reading is something that has been around for a long time and that many teachers do within their classroom routines. He says that it may go by many names, but at its heart, "[it helps] students develop the ability to use a collection of comprehension strategies to talk and think about texts at deeper and deeper levels of meaning and understanding" ("Building the Habits of Close Reading," 2015).

Both of these quotes speak to the value in using close reading in education. A close reading activity is a perfect choice for high school readers to really dig deep into a text and understand the full meaning. This activity is described in Lent's textbook, This is Disciplinary Literacy, and I love the way that she has the activity progress:

1. The text is broken into parts (such as sections or paragraphs). Students only receive the first part initially and are asked to read it quickly.

2. They then do a re-read and do annotations (teachers can provide ideas of what to focus on during this annotation)

3. Students then gather in small groups to share their annotations.

4. Pass out the next section and repeat the process.

5. At the end, students gather in groups to discuss the whole text with guided questions from the teacher.

6. A sharing of some sort happens at the end, perhaps with chart paper to share their major takeaways.

(Lent, 2016, pp. 54-55)

This approach will help overcome a challenge that many teachers are facing - when students receive a text, they want to just scan for answers instead of fully immersing themselves into the text. It also engages students in building the reading skills that the Common Core addresses, skills such as "questioning, making inferences, paraphrasing, and tracing an argument/thought" (Butler, 2016).

What I also love about this activity is the element of collaboration that is ingrained within it. This is not a solitary activity; instead, throughout the process, students are checking in with other students, sharing their findings, and making meaning that they share with others. This is the perfect activity for all disciplines, not just an ELA classroom like my own. I can see this being a useful activity for any discipline since all use informational texts in their learning units.

The way the approach is described above is probably best for students reading at grade level. For struggling learners, I could see adding a class share out component after each section so that everyone can make sure they are on track and get feedback about their findings. For accelerated learners, I think the process could be streamlined, and they could work with a couple sections at a time.

I selected close reading as one of my approaches this week because I feel like it encapsulates so many skills that our students need right now in this time when student reading abilities are being criticized so harshly. We need to refocus on fundamental skills that will help us build strong readers.

The benefits with this activity are that students are learning transferable skills that I can see them incorporating quite quickly into their reading habits. The drawbacks with this activity are that it will be time-consuming, especially at first when students are getting used to this process of close reading.

This strategy does connect to several skills that strong readers use, skills such as asking questions, making inferences, finding purpose, considering word choices, and more.

The research I found does validate this strategy as useful to building informational text literacy. More research into how to continue close reading after the initial teaching of the strategy would be important to really help this be a sustainable one for our students.

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"Just because students are inundated with visuals doesn't mean they know how to read them" (Lent, 2016, p. 42). This idea is completely accurate with what I have been experiencing in my classroom with teenagers. They are getting more visuals through their electronic devices than they know how to deal with. Like the scanning that happens with text, I do believe they are scanning the visuals they see for quick bites of information but not taking the time to immerse themselves and take away greater meaning.

A strategy presented in the textbook This is Disciplinary Literacy helps address this need for students to become more proficient in analyzing visuals for information and understanding. The strategy is essentially an analysis session of a visual using a set of pointed questions to unlock their understanding. Here is the approach provided in this text:

1. Students begin in small groups, and each group can have the same visual or you could give each group a different visual.

2. Next the teacher says to the students that "text, either in the form of words or images, communicates ideas by the author or creator that the reader must accurately interpret" (Lent, 2016, p. 43).

3. Students then use a provided set of questions to use as they analyze an image together. This is on page 43 of the textbook and would be great to use as is or adapt. The questions are excellent ones such as "What is the purpose of the visual?" and "Whose viewpoint is represented?"

4. I would finally have students share their findings with the whole class.

I am excited to try this activity because in my past experiences, I have found students absolutely love to analyze visuals. There is something that feels novel about it - almost like they are not doing actual work!

The strategy of analyzing visuals will be useful in my discipline, English Language Arts, when I bring in supplemental materials to our novel studies; materials such as infographics, photography, news articles, and more contain visuals that students will need to review for knowledge. In other disciplines students definitely encounter information through visuals, so this activity would certainly transfer to their content areas as well.

As far as adapting for other learners, I feel that accelerated learners could then use this knowledge to create their own visual to showcase their findings during a research project, as an example.

I selected this strategy over others because I feel this is a skill that is much needed in this world where students are constantly looking at visuals. Teaching them useful ways to analyze what they see would be very important.

The benefits of this strategy are that students will be highly engaged in completing this activity. The drawbacks could be that students may need more support in digging deep into the knowledge and questioning involved in analyzing visuals.

Proficient readers do slow down and study visuals more than struggling readers. They recognize that visuals do provide additional information for readers.

The evidence seems strong that this is a strategy that is critical for teachers of all disciplines to incorporate into their classrooms, but I would love to gather more research about different techniques to help them practice analyzing visuals.

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Building the habits of close reading to support comprehension: fostering close reading of texts is crucial to developing students' knowledge and skills. (2015). District Administration, 51(6), 2+. https://link-gale-com.une.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/A418980234/PROF?u=bidd97564&sid=bookmark-PROF&xid=e19b21eb

Butler, S. (Director). Simplifying text complexity. (2016, March 15).[Video/DVD] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFZ97akqsV4&t=2s

Lent, R. C. (2016). This is disciplinary literacy: Reading, writing, thinking, and doing. Thousand Oakes, CA: Corwin Literacy.