Strategy Study: Close Reading

I'm sure many of you have heard the latest buzz word in education: Close Reading.

With the Common Core standards came a new level of rigor, a new depth of text, and a new need for strategies to bridge the two for our students. Insert the "new" reading strategy called "close reading"! If you are unfamiliar with the term, basically close reading means to delve DEEPLY into a text by reading very closely. In a nutshell, it is not necessarily a "new" strategy, but just a combination of excellent "old" strategies being used in a new way.

There are a number of ways you can "do" close reading. One of the most basic strategies is rereading (and most importantly, rereading with a purpose). This could mean that you give students a focus question, or do a jigsaw type of reread where students must find the main idea of their particular section, etc. For ESL students, rereading is a critical strategy. One pass through a text when you are limited in your English proficiency is not enough exposure to grasp what you need to within a text. Many students develop a negative opinion of rereading. (It's boring. Only people who didn't understand it the first time need to reread. etc.) It is important for us as teachers to teach rereading as a STRATEGY, not a punishment or an option.

Another close reading strategy is intense vocabulary instruction. However, in the past most of us were taught that vocabulary instruction should be done before a lesson in a "front-loading" style. Close reading suggests that students learn vocabulary within/ through/ and by interacting with a text. Vocabulary instruction should happen throughout reading and words should be revisited as students develop and refine their understanding of the words. This creates a much deeper understanding because students are developing their own understanding instead of simply being told a word's meaning. This is an EXCELLENT strategy for ELL students. Especially when students get very used to simply being told a words meaning before every lesson, they do not develop the skills necessary to learn new words independently.

The last close reading strategy (or the last one to be discussed today :)) is text dependent questioning. It is so easy for teachers to fall into similar questioning patterns for any and all texts. (Who are the characters? What is the setting? etc). However, in order to develop a deeper understanding of rigorous text, students need to be required to actually USE the text. They need to refer to the text, to go back and find evidence and specific quotations to support their claims.  These are college and career readiness skills! Close reading highly emphasizes text dependent questioning and teaching students how to properly answer questions using evidence and support from the text. This is by far the most challenging skill to teach ELL students, but also one of the most important. Text dependent questioning is something that is present on high stakes testing, college assignments, and real life! Being able to answer questions in detail and with evidence is absolutely critical for student's future success.

In the spring I will be conducting research to examine the effects of close reading strategies on the comprehension of my ELL students. I hope to see some good results!

Happy Teaching!

References

Dalton, B. (2013). Engaging Children in Close Reading: Multimodal Commentaries and Illustration Remix. Reading Teacher, 66(8), 642-649. doi:10.1002/trtr.1172

Dobler, E. (2013). Authentic Reasons for Close Reading: How to Motivate Students to Take Another Look. Reading Today, 30(6), 13-15

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012). Close Reading In Elementary Schools. Reading Teacher, 66(3), 179-188. doi:10.1002/TRTR.01117

Harris, J. (2014). EXPANDING THE SCHOOL LIBRARY MEDIA SPECIALIST'S ROLE: INTEGRATING CLOSE READING ACTIVITIES INTO THE LIBRARY CURRICULUM. Library Media Connection, 32(4), 14-16

WIDA ELD framework- How to explain and use with your classroom teachers

This past week I spent three days in Frankfort at the yearly WIDA conference! There was a WEALTH of information given over these three days, but I felt like one particular activity stuck with me the most and will be very important for me to take back to "my" classroom teachers. Every year the classroom teachers in my building get a refresher course on the WIDA ELD framework in hopes that they will use this framework during planning and differentiating for our ELL students. However...we know that usually doesn't happen. The WIDA framework is not user friendly for those that are not ESL trained and are unfamiliar with the lingo associated with the framework. One of the ideas suggested by the presenter of the training was the help your classroom teachers create their own ELD strand that applies to their unit of study (instead of using the generic samples, which never seem to correspond to the classroom)

 One of the first things that classroom teachers need to understand in order to make a strand is the difference between the "discourse level", "sentence level", and "word/phrase level"of text. They need to understand that students will work from word to sentence to discourse level throughout their proficiency development, and that making modifications to accommodate their current level is the right thing to do! So many teachers are hesitant to change the type of response or the way they are asking students to respond because they do not think it's fair. However, this is exactly what we need to be doing in order to meet our student's needs and understand how to push them to the next level. It is important to work through the major texts and tasks involved in each unit and recognize what students will need to understand at each level. Below is a detailed explanation of what each level entails. This would be a perfect visual for explaining each level to your classroom teachers.
 
 I am hoping to attend one planning session per month with each of my grade level teams to help them create their own ELD strand for their more "cumulative" assignments/ tasks/ texts. Below is a sample of a 2nd grade ELD strand that we created for their informative writing piece at the end of their current unit

 I hope to continue to do this throughout this school year, and hopefully this will help my classroom teacher build a better understanding of how to accommodate our ELL students based on their proficiency levels! I hope you can use this strategy too!

 Happy Teaching!