This is the second part of a two-part look at close reading: Challenges | Strategies

In this era of more demanding standards for all students, close reading has become a common exercise for students in various grade levels. For English language learners — generally defined as students who are not achieving academically due to the level of English language proficiency — accessing complex, grade-level text can be especially demanding.

In the first part of this article, we looked at challenges educators face with close reading. In the second part, we'll discuss some strategies to implement.

Strategies to support ELLs

Close reading requires multiple readings of text. During the first reading of the text, students determine the meaning, or what the text says.

The subsequent readings should serve additional, separate purposes. During the second and third readings, students should determine how a text works, and evaluate the quality and value of the texts. These processes can be accomplished through annotation and text dependent questions.

Teachers should begin the close-reading process with English learners with short, robust texts. The chosen text may at first be text that is familiar to students to practice the process. This, however, does not always need to be the case, and should be used only early on. As students learn to annotate, reread text for particular information and analyze text structure, unfamiliar text can and should be used.

To differentiate for English learners at varying proficiency levels, the process can be taught and conducted in small groups. At the elementary level, this might be as a part of a center or other small group activity. At the secondary level, teachers can work with a small group of English learners while other students are engaged in independent or small group activities. In addition, the close-reading process can be slowed down for ELLs and can take place with shorter texts.

At times, teachers have believed that frontloading and building background before a text is critical to understanding and that we must essentially tell students what the text is about before reading it. Critics of this approach have pointed out that if you tell the students everything about the text before reading it, you have essentially taken away the purpose for actually reading the text.

Some critical background information that sets the stage for the reading, as well as some of the critical vocabulary essential to understanding the text, can and should be taught before the reading of complex text. However, some vocabulary, as well as many of the key concepts, can be taught during or after the reading of the text.

In addition, background knowledge can be learned through further reading. Have students read other texts to facilitate the acquisition of background knowledge while at the same time increasing the amount of reading students are doing. In this case, the text does not have to be complex.

As students read the text, the teacher can facilitate comprehension through the use of pictures or short video clips. These scaffolds do not necessarily have to be done before reading. In fact, it may be beneficial to allow the students to struggle a bit with comprehension and try to figure out what the text says before moving too quickly into telling the students the meaning of the text.

It is prudent, of course, to not push students to such a point of frustration with reading the text that they shut down. Rather, help them to understand that struggle is not negative, and that through hard work and support, they can be successful with reading even high-level, difficult and complex texts.

When teaching the annotation process, additional scaffolding through the gradual release of responsibility should be used. There are several ways to annotate text. Students may mark the text by highlighting, underlining or circling powerful, interesting or unknown words, and add sketches to aid with comprehension, for example.

When guiding students through the annotation process, the teacher can begin by pointing out to students what they should annotate, depending on the focus of the lesson. Once the teacher has demonstrated the annotation skill, the students should be asked what to mark on the text. This can be done after reading a sentence, series of sentences, or short paragraph depending on the text.

If students are able to begin identifying the areas of annotation, continue the process of reading and asking them what to annotate until they are able to do so independently. If they are unable to identify what to annotate, continue sharing what should be annotated through think-alouds and explicit explanation of what and where to annotate and why.

The gradual release model just described can also be used with text-dependent questions. English learners may have difficulty understanding what the question is asking. Discussion of the questions and what they are asking, as well as instruction in the academic language embedded in the questions and in the answers revealed through the text, will be critical in helping students answer the questions.

Instruction in the words and phrases critical to the understanding of the text may have been done before and during the reading of the text. The text-dependent questions provide another opportunity for teachers to focus students on academic language such as key words and phrases in the text.

The close-reading process is challenging for all students especially English learners, whose English proficiency level makes it even more challenging to access complex text. However, it is important that we as educators find ways to scaffold the task and help students to read text that is at their grade level.

Students should not be limited to reading complex text, nor should they be excluded from it. It is our responsibility as educators to facilitate the process and help students to meet the challenging demands of our current standards.