Close reading is an important skill for students to learn in school and was designed to build strong reading habits in children that they will need in higher education and future careers. It requires students to really focus on what the author is saying, what the author’s purpose is in writing the text, what the vocabulary means within the text, and how the text is structured.
Analyzing and comparing texts is challenging, and rarely comes naturally. By helping students learn the process of analysis with key strategies, they can become more comfortable with analyzing fiction and nonfiction texts on their own. These strategies work perfectly with paired text sets and help students improve their reading analysis skills.
As teachers, we can help our students learn to analyze and evaluate complex texts with the following targeted questions and reading strategies:
- Ask an Essential Question to help students focus as they read
- Incorporate Guided Questions and Note-taking to help students understand the text and find key information easily
- Use Text-Dependent Questions to help students understand the text deeply
- Identify the Text Structure to help students understand the differences between fiction and nonfiction texts
- Cite Evidence to Support Conclusions with writing tasks that help students demonstrate understanding
Download these free printables for Reading Comprehension: Paired Text grades 1–6 here!
Strategy 1: Ask an Essential Question
Close reading begins with setting a purpose. Incorporating essential questions about a reading theme or topic can help direct students to think about a specific theme as they read and analyze text.
Teaching students how to navigate complex texts with detailed reading skills is especially helpful when students don’t have much background information on the topic they are reading about. Activating prior knowledge about a text is a good idea, but the fundamental goal of close reading is to teach students how to understand a text without much background knowledge. This set of skills is designed to help students evaluate a text based on what they read, not what they already know. Focusing on a specific text-related question can help students narrow down their focus as they read.
Strategy 2: Incorporate Guided Questions and Note-taking
Build important lesson scaffolds within each close reading activity with key questions and important note-taking skills. While reading together, model these skills:
- Asking guided questions while reading to show students how to ask and answer their own questions about a text
- Chunking information to show how to break up text into readable portions
- Annotating and highlighting text so students can find key information easily
Strategy 3: Present Text-Dependent Questions
Identifying key aspects of a text can also help students understand its purpose better.
Incorporating text-dependent questions while reading and after reading can help students learn to recognize which parts of a text are the most important and what details support the bigger theme or idea. These types of questions engage students in evaluating the text and provide guidance on how to assess the information presented.
Strategy 4: Identify Text Structure
Identifying text structure can help students understand the differences between fiction and nonfiction texts. By learning to identify a text’s purpose and genre, students will know which questions to ask when reading a specific type of text and can make inferences about what they are reading based the structure.
Narrative/fiction texts require students to think about:
- Characters
- Settings
- Problems and solutions
Nonfiction texts require students to evaluate whether a text is:
- Comparing/contrasting
- Defining a problem and a solution
- Delivering information sequentially
- Describing a cause and its effect.
When students are making inferences with text, they are learning how to ask and answer their own questions about what they are reading. These questions can help to guide students later in the lesson as they incorporate the text to support their conclusions:
- What is the location?
- When did it happen?
- Who is doing it?
- What is happening?
- What caused this to happen?
- How was the problem solved?
- How did this text make you feel?
Strategy 5: Cite Evidence to Support Conclusions
Close reading strategies are designed to help students understand the text so well that they can reference it to support their thoughts and ideas through either writing or talking about a specific text. A good way to monitor students’ understanding during a close reading activity is to assign a writing task that requires them to cite evidence to support their conclusions.
Part of learning to cite evidence includes learning:
- How to answer text-dependent questions
- How to participate in teacher-guided discussions
- How to mark up the text with questions and thoughts
- How to make connections beyond the text (often with whole class or partner discussions)
Additional Resources:
Close reading lessons can require significant time and preparation commitment from teachers and students. Incorporating ready-made close reading units is a great option to save planning time and ensure that your instructional lessons include the important aspects of close reading such as:
- Essential questions
- Vocabulary
- Text-dependent questions
- Text structure analysis
- Written assessment task that cites evidence
Reading Comprehension: Paired Text for grades 1–6 provides in-depth reading selections about grade-level science and social studies concepts to help students learn to closely examine texts.
Each robust unit includes two thematically related sections, an informational text and a literary text, that are focused on an essential question. Each paired text unit requires students to evaluate information from two different texts and includes a writing-prompt assessment. Each selections’ activities include vocabulary development in context, an oral close reading discussion, comprehension questions, and a writing prompt. Every unit includes an assessment with discussion questions, texts, essential question, and a writing prompt.
Teach your students how to deeply comprehend brief and complex texts and how to reference a text to support their thoughts and ideas with close reading lessons and activities!
For more close reading activities and tips, check out: How to Improve Students’ Close Reading: Strategies for Nonfiction Text
Heather Foudy is a certified elementary teacher with over 7 years’ experience as an educator and volunteer in the classroom. She enjoys creating lessons that are meaningful and creative for students. She is currently working for Evan-Moor’s marketing and communications team and enjoys building learning opportunities that are both meaningful and creative for students and teachers alike.