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Chapter 1

RESEARCH AND THEORY

In this chapter, we start with why close reading is a very important skill for every secondary school student and describe one method for practicing close reading in the secondary classroom. As background for understanding the importance of close reading, we will also look briefly at the history of literary criticism—the foundational methodology behind modern close reading processes for secondary students. Then, to further define close reading for the purposes of this book, we’ll review some research applicable to the strategy of close reading. We’ll discuss the importance of two factors in considering close reading in the classroom: (1) research background and (2) instructional shifts. Finally, we’ll close on the steps of the close reading process.

The Need for Close Reading

Today, the written word conflicts not just with movies and television but also with digital texts that are lively and interactive, value action over thought, and provide a level of engagement with which the lightly encountered written word cannot compete. The written word demands more than a simple reading of the story; it demands work—questioning the text and interacting at an intellectual level that movies and video games often do not require. We could examine the value our culture places on such action-based encounters and the rejection—though perhaps not consciously—of intellectual life, but to what end? American culture is what it is, and it isn’t likely to change soon. In a culture that tends to preach activity over thought, sports over the arts, and the politics of action over the politics of contemplation, students may be unlikely to choose an evening with a good book over an evening with the latest video game.

Yet we live in a globally connected world, and students will grow up to compete for jobs with global citizens from very different cultures, many of which value great ideas, great minds, and the role of a thinking and reasoning human engaged with the world. As such, we as teachers have a responsibility to value critical thinking, model it for students, and ask students to make every attempt to fully actualize the brains they have.

Most educators are aware that the skill of reading well is essential for success in school, the working world, and life. But it may well be that we never examine the underlying question: Why? There are pedantic answers to that question—to be informed, to share information, to understand job responsibilities, and so on. But to go beyond these mundane responses we must ask the question, “Why should we read?” Susan Wise Bauer (2003), in her book The Well-Educated Mind, begins her chapter on the art of reading with the claim that most futurists believe and have declared:

We are a postliterate culture. Books are outdated forms of communication. Soon the flood of information that is now contained in books, magazines, and newspapers will be sorted by artificial intelligence and presented in multimedia formats. No more boring print. (p. 24)

Bauer (2003) goes on to explain that there is still a role for print in the world, but changes since the publication of her book suggest the futurists’ vision of the new nonprint world may be closer than she imagined. Anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in a 21st century secondary school classroom will agree that students today don’t read as much as those of prior generations.

Why should we read? When we return to that question, the real answer has less to do with pragmatic necessity in our now primarily digital lives and more to do with what reading print material does to us. The act of reading the printed word (more than just reading the words for surface meaning) is the process of taking words and unpacking their ideas and deeper meanings. Reading is an intentional action that helps create and influence our view of ourselves as thinking beings with values that are cultural, social, and even political and theological.

In a world of digital interactivity, students grow up expecting to engage with every experience by allowing the experience to engage them. This is fundamentally passive. Interactive video games and other digital media do the work of engaging users. Books, on the other hand, require readers to do the work, using their intellect and imagination to fully experience the text. When students are accustomed to digital media, they may bring those expectations to printed texts, and their reading experiences suffer as a result.

For some educators, the conventional wisdom is to adjust their instruction to meet students’ expectations of passive engagement. However, this does students a disservice. At some point, students need to experience the joy of actively engaging in a great essay or novel. At some point, they need to be able to read more than the story, more than the words on the page, more than for the simple quiz on the chapter. They need to bring themselves to the text. As one of my graduate professors often said, “Your reading of a text is only as good as the questions you ask. And if you ask no questions of the text, it will yield no answers” (B. Mudge, personal communication, September 5, 1997). Students need to know what questions to ask and how to answer them.

The standards movement has precipitated a stronger emphasis on the ability to read, analyze, and report on challenging texts, both literary and informational (Student Achievement Partners, 2016). As the standards movement developed, the emphasis on informational text developed with it (Kendall, 2011). English language arts teachers found themselves in a position of having to add the study of informational texts more often into their curricula. Social studies teachers had taught informational texts for years, but they found an increased emphasis on the analysis of primary sources, which often challenge students with difficult ideas and unfamiliar styles.

Standards in English language arts (and to a lesser extent in social studies) often depict a sharp division between literary and informational texts. A closer examination, however, reveals an enormous degree of overlap in the skills needed to address these two kinds of texts. Consider these two eighth-grade Common Core Reading standards, one for informational texts and one for literary texts:

RI.8.2: Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text. (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers [NGA & CCSSO], 2010)

RL.8.2: Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text. (NGA & CCSSO, 2010)

While a few terms differ, these two standards represent the same skill set. We might wonder why there are multiple separate standards that address the same skills. One answer is that the authors of these standards wanted to send a strong message about the importance of teaching the analysis of informational text, a genre that has traditionally held a lesser place in the English language arts curriculum (Kendall, 2011). In making this judgment, the creators of the state standards were correct. The ability to understand and analyze informational text is a basic skill every student must master. Students who go on to higher education will clearly spend the majority of their reading on informational texts, and if one considers the reading one does in daily life, be it for leisure or career, most is informational text. It is a basic life skill.

Secondary teachers of English, social studies, and the wide range of content areas that access state or Common Core English language arts standards must develop students’ abilities to read critically and analyze an informational or literary text. These standards are challenging, and teachers face the limitations of time and student interest as they accept this challenge. It may well be that teachers sometimes choose to provide teacher-led analysis of a text as a method of saving time in a crowded curriculum. After all, they may reason, teacher-led analysis is better than no analysis at all. While that may be true, it does not lead students to develop their abilities to read and analyze a text independently, as required by the standards. That means we must adjust how we lead students to texts and focus on the gradual increase of their abilities to connect with a challenging text and unpack the author’s meaning and method. One way of accomplishing this is through the art of close reading. Close reading is a skill that students develop over many years, with many teachers in many classrooms. It provides students a way to engage with a text, think deeply about it, and form well-supported opinions about it. In developing a deeper understanding of close reading, we should consider how it emerged as an analytical strategy.

The History of Close Reading

Close analysis of text is the result of centuries of emerging literary analysis (Richter, 2007). People have not always read intentionally and analytically, but from the earliest days, analysts have sought methods to understand texts in deep ways and go beyond the words on the page for both literary and informational texts (Richter, 2007). The various schools of literary criticism are the result of centuries of careful development and represent a wide range of methods to approach a text analytically. Thus, an important starting point for understanding the close reading process is examining the development of these literary-critical schools.

The first person to write about the interpretation of human writing was Plato (Richter, 1998). Actually, it is likely he wasn’t the first, but his is the first writing to survive to the present day. Plato presents his ideas through a historical character, Socrates, about whom we know very little beyond what Plato includes in his dialogues. Plato (380 BCE/1992) gives short shrift to poets in The Republic, the book-length dialogue describing Socrates’s vision of the ideal society. Socrates banishes the poets from his city-state, claiming they cannot be trusted to transmit the proper values to young people, thus indicating that the written word does more than just relate a story. Even within the decisions the Greek hero Achilles made in Homer’s Iliad, Socrates interprets a value system that promotes self-interest over the good of the many, something he would not have influencing the young audience of Homer’s epic. Though Socrates is a harsh critic, his comments indicate he sees the power of written language to influence the young.

Some decades after Plato described Socrates’s views, Aristotle (335 BCE/1997) took a different position on written language. Aristotle’s perspective on art is mimetic—it imitates nature. The more similar the art is to its object of imitation, the higher its quality. In his Poetics, which modern scholars believe is little more than a collection of his lecture notes, Aristotle described the tragedy, the form of drama the Athenians so perfected in the 4th century BCE. Unlike Plato, Aristotle was less interested in the influence a writer might have over the reader (or in the case of tragedy, the audience) and much more interested in how a playwright accomplishes the effects he creates on the stage (Richter, 1998). In this, Aristotle might be considered the first close reader, aiming at a solid analysis of what the writer is doing in the text. Aristotle introduced the concepts of catharsis, the release of the emotions of pity and fear that occurs, in Aristotle’s opinion, most effectively when timed at the crisis of the play; peripeteia, an unexpected turn of events; and anagnorisis, the protagonist’s discovery of new knowledge. Aristotle analyzed Sophocles’s play Oedipus Tyrannus as an example of the best of Greek tragedy. In focusing on an example he considered the height of the genre, Aristotle (335 BCE/1997) described what the perfect tragedy ought to do and thus moved criticism from an analytical to a prescriptive perspective.

Such a structural view of the function of tragedy represents the first unpacking of a creative text known in Western literature and thus serves as the beginning of literary criticism. In taking such an analytical approach, Aristotle suggested that many texts hide more substantial interpretations beneath seemingly innocuous statements and events. By properly approaching a text, you can unpack these interpretations and thus see more than a surface reading of the text. Of course, such an approach does suggest questions about limits and extents: How many interpretations should there be? Are all interpretations valid? Does every text yield multiple interpretations, or even one additional interpretation, beyond the narrative story? When should you stop analyzing? Literary critics struggle with these issues to this very day, and as teachers share close reading and the interpretation of written text with their students, they will struggle with many of the same questions.

Following Aristotle, little substantial change in interpretive reading of texts occurred until the 19th century. It was not until the emergence of the modern era, with a wider range of philosophical and scientific approaches to understanding the world, that new approaches to literary criticism emerged, including formalism, Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, reader-response criticism, and deconstructionism. These important critical approaches provide different “lenses” through which a text may be interpreted. While we wish our students to approach texts from the lens of formalism, each of these approaches has had an important impact on our interpretation of literary texts, and students may use one or more of these approaches in their own personal reaction to a text, so a familiarity with each is important to teachers as they guide student analysis of texts.

Modern Criticism

Political, philosophical, and theological concerns supplanted much new thinking in the West until the Renaissance. Although there were literary critics and writers, such as Dante, Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope, who added to the literature interpretation discussion, there were no enormous revisions in the way people read and interpreted texts until the emergence of many schools of literary criticism in the 19th century (Richter, 1998).

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, critics were mainly concerned with whether texts conformed to classical models and often viewed the value of texts by the degree to which they conformed or didn’t (Richter, 1998). Classical models were something to be admired and seen as a route to some underlying truth behind culture, a truth tied to an adoration of a lost ideal in the classical world. Scholars developed a key idea during this period: that the reading of important literary works would improve one’s ethical standing. George Eliot (1856) perhaps most elegantly stated this in her essay “The Natural History of German Life.” Reading good books made you a better person. As of the early 20th century, scholars were still justifying the teaching of literature that way, and, indeed, the entry of literary study into public schools was grounded in this idea.

Organized systems of interpreting literature emerged as literature made its way into colleges and secondary schools. These schools of literary criticism each focused on a set of agreed-on philosophical presuppositions that affected, to a large extent, the interpretation that resulted. Initially, there were two important schools of literary criticism: (1) biographical and (2) historical.

Biographical criticism has been around since at least the 18th century, and Samuel Johnson (1779–1781) used it in his important work The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, which was enormously popular right into the 20th century. Biographical criticism is intuitively attractive, particularly to those who place great authors on high pedestals. It suggests that, as every reader suspects, much of what happens in the author’s life impacts his or her writing. Thus, biographical criticism strove to analyze the biographies of writers and find connections to their works to read those works more deeply.

For example, biographical critics would point to profound moments in the life of American novelist Edith Wharton that arguably influenced events in her novel Ethan Frome (1911/1992). Wharton, who grew up in 19th century New York City, was raised in a family that shared all the Victorian taboos about women’s sexual feelings. Taught to ignore emerging desires as an adolescent, her emotions escaped in a frequent and terrifying anxiety every time she returned to her parents’ house. Her fear and anxiety were often so profound she was unable to walk inside the house and had to wait at the threshold for the symptoms to pass (Wharton, 1911/1992). Knowing that episode of Wharton’s biography can be telling when reading Ethan Frome. This novel describes a Massachusetts farmer, a former engineering student, who finds himself locked in a loveless marriage and a career he adopted out of necessity rather than interest. Into this barren life comes his wife’s beautiful cousin Mattie Silver. Ethan resists his growing desire for the beautiful girl but cannot deny it. Throughout the novel, the reader is placed in the position of observing important events from beyond a threshold, often a closed door beyond which things are clearly occurring (but which the reader is not privy to). Perhaps more important is the thematic implication of the threshold, where Ethan wishes to express his desire for Mattie but repeatedly stops before doing so—on the threshold of action, so to speak.

While a biographical reading like this may be correct and inform our understanding of the novel, it is certainly not the only way to read Ethan Frome. One of the limitations of biographical criticism is the way it implies that nonbiographical interpretations of a text are somehow less valid than biographical ones. Further, biographical criticism has an inherent flaw: one must know the author’s biography. The fact is, the biographies of the vast majority of writers are unknown. Even in the case of William Shakespeare, regarded as the greatest playwright in the English language, words like may, might, and could signal the uncertainty and speculation of his biographies. The facts known about Shakespeare are few, and the documents from his life even fewer. Sparse data limit the biographical criticism available on our most important writers. Indeed, biographical criticism would have nothing at all to say about the most prolific author in the English language—anonymous.

Simultaneously with biographical criticism, literary critics also favored a historical view of the analysis of written texts. The basic presupposition of historical criticism is that understanding the historical moment of the text creation—particularly the political, theological, cultural, and social contexts—provides insights into interpretive meanings of texts (Historical criticism, 2014). While history is more readily accessible than an author’s biography, fundamental flaws also exist in this approach to interpreting texts. First, not all historical periods are equally knowable. We know a great deal more, for example, about the French Revolution in the late 18th century than we do about the historical events surrounding the Trojan War. Indeed, some are not even sure the Trojan War was a real historical event. Also, while history is more knowable, the question arises as to whose history is the accepted version. There is an adage that history is written by the winners. There is truth to this, and history students will report that any important historical event viewed from the perspective of the losers looks very different from the commonly accepted version. Further, historical criticism starts from the assumption of the strong effect of the historical moment on the author as he or she composes a text. But surely there have been authors who have not succumbed to that influence or who have, like the French philosopher Montaigne, withdrawn from their own society. There are important examples of this throughout the history of literature; in these cases, the historical critic is unsure how to proceed. Historical criticism, while an important step forward beyond the biographical, was clearly not the answer for literary critics.

Formalism

As literary criticism moved into the 20th century, critics sought to bring a more stringent analysis, one grounded in the intrinsic elements of the text (Richter, 1998)—in other words, those portions of the text that can be identified and analyzed separately, using agreed-on analytical techniques. The result of this effort was what has come to be known as formalism. Formalism sought a scientific approach to interpretation of the written word. At its heart was a fundamental shift in the way critical reading was applied to the written text. Rather than seeing the text as an author’s product or a historical moment, early formalism sought to see the text as an object in and of itself, independent of the influence of anything else. Early American formalists advocated seeing the text as a microcosm—a totally self-referential text world (Richter, 1998). The critical reader approached the text analytically to view that world. To do this, formalism accepts some of the precepts of the scientific method and applies them to the analysis of the written word. Science approaches the understanding of a phenomenon by isolating the object of study and applying a universally agreed-on, carefully defined, repeatable scientific method to its analysis. In applying this to literature, formalists began by isolating the subject of their analysis, the text. They claimed that the influence of an author on his or her writing was not to be considered in interpreting the text. Further, the reader’s reaction, which can vary widely, could not be considered either. If one was to approach a written text scientifically, then the written text on the page must be the sole object of scrutiny (Richter, 1998).

Next, formalists needed a set of analytical tools to apply to the written text. Eventually, these tools became the well-known set of literary strategies still taught in English classes today—the elements of literature. These include plot structure, characterization, point of view, figurative language, tone, and theme, to name a few. In attempting to emulate the repeatability of scientific analysis, formalists advocated a very specific method of analyzing these elements. They claimed that if literary critics all studied the same text and properly analyzed that text through the elements of literature, each critic would arrive independently at the same, single, correct interpretation (Richter, 1998).

In the 21st century, few people would wholly agree with this approach to interpreting texts. Most people have been taught that the influence of the reader in unpacking meaning is as valuable and important as the text itself. Some argue that the author’s intention should also be taken into consideration when interpreting a text (Richter, 1998). Yet formalism had a long run and found advocates well into the 20th century. The idea of one right answer continues to be appealing, especially for situations such as standardized test questions on the interpretation of a passage.

Although formalism as a school of criticism has lost its rank as the primary method of interpretation, it still has a place in the wider world of literary criticism today. Formalism provided other critical theories with the nomenclature and tools of analysis those theories use. Thus, when a reader-response critic (see page 13) or feminist critic (see page 12) discusses a passage, he or she will speak about theme, tone, or figurative language. In addition, formalism still provides students with the analytical tools they need to read and interpret written texts.

While literary critics’ primary interpretive method was formalism, by the middle of the 20th century, things had begun to change (Crews, n.d.). A series of interpretive methods that brought other points of view to the reading and interpreting of texts began to emerge. Many of the critical schools rejected the formalist notion that a text is a thing in isolation (Richter, 1998). These methods include Marxist, feminist, and deconstructionist theories. Most of these schools viewed a written text as a product, not just of an author, but also of a culture that strongly influenced the creation of the text, which might adhere to cultural norms or reject them (Richter, 1998). One way to think about these methods is to consider them as lenses one applies when reading and interpreting texts. Each lens will clarify a particular perspective on the passage in question. In approaching the interpretation of texts from a variety of viewpoints, these methods signal a moment when regularity and agreement on meaning were less valued than before, reflecting the shift in Western cultural values more broadly (Crews, n.d.). At this point, many literary critics also began to look for diversity of perspectives, not just in their criticism, but also in the texts themselves, and pushed back against the notion of the Western canon, which predominantly consisted of dead, white, male, Judeo-Christian, straight writers (Richter, 1998).

Marxist Criticism

The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—particularly of the struggle between socioeconomic classes of the proletariat (workers) and bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production)—have had an enormous effect on the study of history, politics, and economics (Magee, 2001; Popkin, 2000). Literary critics have not missed the opportunity to apply the Marxist notion of economics and social structure to literature, providing a lens that can be productive in interpretation (Richter, 1998). Foundational to a Marxist approach to literature is the idea that history is economic. From a Marxist perspective, history can be reinterpreted not as a series of actions by great men (kings, generals, politicians) or great countries but as the working out of class struggles, with economics driving historical decisions. Marx owed a great deal to philosopher Georg Hegel, who saw the world in terms of conflict, with opposing powers constantly in a struggle to allow a world spirit to reveal and fulfill itself (Magee, 2001). Marx saw the struggle as primarily one of class. He also advocated using history as a political weapon in promoting the emergence and triumph of the proletariat in its struggle against the bourgeoisie (Magee, 2001). Marxist literary critics are often unafraid of taking Marx’s advice in this matter and reread literature as a weapon against Western capitalism.

Critic Warren Montag (1992) provided one example of how the Marxist lens can yield a very different reading of a text. In his article “The ‘Workshop of Filthy Creation’: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein,” Montag (1992) rewrote the traditional reading of Mary W. Shelley’s (1818/1992) famous novel. Readers often interpret Frankenstein as a comment on the limitations of science, suggesting there are actions that scientists—even if they could—should not take. Death is meant to be final, and the reanimation of dead flesh means that a scientist at some point is playing God. Readers often take the ending of the novel, tragic for both creation and creator, to mean that some things are better left unknown.

Montag (1992), on the other hand, approached the novel from the perspective of class. Victor Frankenstein, brought up in a wealthy home, provided with a first-class education, and clearly a part of the ruling class, is the perfect example of the bourgeoisie. In animating his creature, he is in fact, through his horrible actions, giving birth to a symbol of proletariat man. In the conflict between these two characters, Shelley captured the fundamental conflict of Western capitalism—the need of the bourgeoisie to create, use, and control the proletariat, and the desire of the proletariat to rise beyond that control and be totally independent. This is a very different reading of the novel, but a legitimate one nevertheless.

Placing the presuppositions of Marxist criticism on the reading of any text, particularly a nonfiction one, can help students quickly see the results of changes in perspective and help them understand that different readers can experience the same text very differently.

Feminist Criticism

Equally surprising are the changes that emerge when looking at a work through a feminist lens. As feminism became more and more a force in Western culture through the mid and late 20th century, literary critics sought to apply some of the basic presuppositions of feminism to the interpretation of literature (Richter, 2007). There are many feminisms, approaches all sharing the basic ideas of feminism but approaching literary interpretation with different agendas (Richter, 1998). Still, there are a few common traits nearly all feminisms share, and they are often focused on the politics of gender.

First, feminism focuses on the fact that men designed and benefit from patriarchy, a system of government, culture, and civilization. Although it may appear to be normal, patriarchy is not inherent or natural to human society. Patriarchy only appears normal because it has been in operation for so long and because men have kept themselves in decision-making positions that allow them to perpetuate the system. An important effect of patriarchy is that it robs women of their identity through objectification. Because patriarchy encourages males to act on their propensity to see women as objects of sexual desire, it places women only in that role, and therefore removes the possibility of women having identities beyond that objectification. Therefore, patriarchy is the problem, and feminism seeks to overturn it as a system (Richter, 1998).

In applying these ideas to literature, approaching a traditional story by focusing on gender and the problems of patriarchy will yield yet another (and quite legitimate) reading. As feminist critics examined the Western canon, they criticized the fact that male authors wrote a disproportionate number of these works (Richter, 1997; Woolf & Gordon, 2005). Some women-authored works relegated to secondary status (or worse) at the time of their publication were rediscovered as feminism gained acceptance. One such work is Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening, written in 1899, which literary critics virtually ignored until the middle of the 20th century. Today, The Awakening is one of the most studied texts in college classrooms and some high schools (Chopin, 1899/1994), but it took a shift in the way society views gender roles and the objectification of women for that change to occur.

Applying a feminist perspective to major events and character interactions in a text can yield some fascinating authorial moves that a formalist reading might not.

Postmodernism

The ideas of postmodernism (for example, skepticism, the rejection of objective truth, knowledge as socially constructed, and so on) also found their way into the interpretation of writing in the late 1960s and the years following. One example of this is poststructuralism. Poststructuralist critics desired to remove the structures traditional culture had placed on the reader’s view of the written text. A traditional view focuses on binaries—good versus evil, black versus white, United States versus the world, and a whole variety of dichotomous approaches to understanding ideas. Poststructuralism sought to identify the complexities of the world, to show that difficult ideas resist the reduction to simplistic two-sided discussions. While there is an appeal in identifying the complexities of human life and applying this to the reading of a text, poststructuralism was also seen as an attack on a more traditional or conservative worldview.

Perhaps the deepest and most challenging form of poststructuralism is deconstructionism. Emerging out of language theory, deconstructionism identified the disconnect that can occur between the written word on the page and the thing it refers to—between the signifier and the signified (Richter, 1998). Deconstructionists point out that writing itself perpetuates the distance between signifier and signified because the gap between the two continually grows as language proceeds. Eventually, meaning itself is lost in this disconnect. Starting there, deconstructionists sought to reject nearly all Western culture traditions and began an attack on the Western canon. If language defers meaning, meaning cannot be the source of our understanding of the value of a text. If that is true, no one text is better than any other. A text by an author outside the Western tradition is no better than a traditional canonical text. Once at this philosophical point, one can attack the very idea of a text. Soon, one can read nearly everything with meaning, connotation, theme, and purpose (Richter, 1998). While deconstructionism does not play a significant role in close reading as this book describes, it is an important critical lens and an interesting look into how far literary theory can go.

Reader-Response Criticism

Another important approach to interpreting literature is reader-response criticism. While the role of the reader in experiencing literature had been sidelined during various historical periods (for example, during the Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which prioritized the “genius” of the artist), by the 20th century, literary critics were re-establishing the vital role of the reader or audience in experiencing literature (Richter, 1998). One way to understand reader-response theory is to see it as something like the opposite of formalism. Formalism identifies the text as the sole object of scrutiny—the roles of the author and the reader are not important to the creation of meaning. Reader-response theory examines the reaction of the reader as the key element in establishing meaning. Wayne C. Booth (1961) expressed this idea most fully in The Rhetoric of Fiction.

One inherent difficulty with the reader-response method is its potential to generate as many readings of a text as there are readers of the text. While it is correct that the reader is vital to the creation of textual meaning, students practicing close reading will need to share a common method that produces common results. Further, the common elements of literary criticism provide the basis for standardized tests, not the response of the reader. Although reader-response theory has its role in the interpretation of literature, it isn’t useful on its own for close reading in classrooms.

In the end, multiple valid readings of any written piece are the result. This fact challenges every teacher to present a reasonable approach for arriving at a valid reading of the text. Formalist literary devices provide the foundation for any critical reading of a text and will provide the evidence for students to assemble meaning. Students might then apply one of the critical lenses to establish a valid reading, grounded in solid textual evidence. As teachers work with beginning critical readers, the focus must be solidly on formalist ideas, since this will provide emerging literary critics with the necessary tools to be accurate in their analysis, both in class and on standardized tests.

Having reviewed the historical background of literary criticism and its instructional technique, close reading, let us consider two important factors in bringing this technique to the classroom, its research background and important instructional shifts that close reading helps us meet.

Research Background

In examining the research background on close reading as an instructional strategy, it is useful to define a turning point in interest in the strategy. Prior to the implementation of the CCSS and the subsequent revisions of state standards in non–Common Core states, close reading was not a widely practiced instructional strategy in U.S. secondary schools, and thus “it has not been studied directly through rigorous academic research” (Student Achievement Partners, 2016, p. 10). Since 2005, with changes wrought by the aforementioned revisions of state standards, there has been increased interest in the use of close reading. Luckily, there are encouraging research studies of aspects of close reading that suggest the strategy is highly effective.

Close reading accesses several important aspects of the teaching of reading, most importantly vocabulary and syntax instruction. Further, close reading encourages the development of fluency through its repeated readings of texts, made more broadly effective with its focus on deliberately practicing with complex texts. Researchers K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer (1993) have shown that working repeatedly with complex texts, where students have feedback on their progress over extended periods, results in highly developed interpretation skills. An additional area that close reading accesses is the standard of coherence, where closely reading complex texts develops students’ appreciation for what texts have to offer. Students who develop a high standard of coherence expect to understand a text deeply and will work to achieve that understanding (Pearson & Liben, 2013).

Researchers have shown the importance of vocabulary development for decades. Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley (1995) studied the effects of poor vocabulary development on students at risk in a study of conversations in the home as the children developed. The study showed that low-socioeconomic families provide fewer exposures to conversation than high-socioeconomic families. In 2003, Hart and Risley published a study including the 1995 information with additional data that demonstrated students from low-socioeconomic families can arrive at age three having been exposed to thirty million fewer words than their high-socioeconomic counterparts. Vocabulary level is directly related to a student’s ability to read, as most reading instruction begins by teaching students to decode words on a page (Kamil & Hiebert, 2005). Thus, the vocabulary gap becomes a reading gap. Keith E. Stanovich’s (1986) study described the prolonged effects of reading gaps. Poor readers do not make the same progress as strong readers across reading instruction in school, so the reading gap expands. By having them practice close reading as one aspect of a robust reading instruction program, teachers give students the tools to help close these gaps.

In the practice of close reading, students must interact with textual structures at the sentence and paragraph levels. This action develops an understanding of and the ability to analyze syntax, which has been shown to be one of the most challenging analytical elements for students (Nelson, Perfetti, Liben, & Liben, 2012). A strong understanding of syntax has been shown to promote student reading comprehension (Goff, Pratt, & Ong, 2005).

Close reading also requires students to return often to the same text with increasingly closer looks at the elements of the passage. These repeated readings improve fluency, which has been shown to have a direct connection to student reading comprehension (Paige, 2011). Further, the National Reading Panel’s (2000) meta-analysis demonstrated the direct connection between repeated readings of the same text and increases in both reading fluency and comprehension.

Instructional Shifts

Instructional shifts in English language arts and mathematics have been identified as implementation of Common Core State Standards and the associated revisions of non-CCSS state standards proceed. In English language arts, these key instructional shifts include (Common Core State Standards Initiative, n.d.):

1. Regular practice with complex texts and their academic language

2. Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts, both literary and informational

3. Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction

The instructional strategy of close reading is one very powerful method of achieving all these instructional shifts. It provides the additional benefits of increasing vocabulary acquisition, reading fluency, and reading comprehension (Student Achievement Partners, 2016). A 2006 study of the ACT test indicated that students’ abilities to work with, comprehend, and analyze complex texts is a strong indicator of college readiness. Useful in most situations, the close reading process has the advantage of being a strong method for practicing analysis, whether by a single student (such as in a testing situation) or, more ideally, in a group situation (such as a class discussion; ACT, 2006). Given that information, close reading is a strategy every teacher should consider using on a regular basis, since the ACT study indicated that only 51 percent of all students who took the ACT in 2005 (and significantly lower proportions of disadvantaged socioeconomic and ethnic groups) demonstrated college readiness in reading (ACT, 2006).

Following is an effective process for teaching close reading, recommended as a way to support these instructional shifts. The following chapters provide more detail on the process.

A Process for Close Reading

Teachers who have used close reading in their classrooms likely will have tried many different methods. The Introduction to Great Books (Great Books Foundation, 1990) program informs the process of close reading this book describes. The Great Books Foundation designed, developed, and published this program to provide a framework for students to encounter and enter challenging texts. The following recommended process bears resemblance to their approach, though the discussion process looks considerably different. It is effective for close reading for most students in most classrooms, and students can adapt it for testing situations. The process is effective regardless of the kind of close reading text or content area. As a reminder, the steps in their basic form are as follows.

1. Prereading: Answering a question and accessing background knowledge on the close reading passage

2. Reading twice and annotating: Reading through the selection twice while annotating potential evidence

3. Generating questions: Using annotations to generate questions about the text that are useful in a general discussion or as prompts for the next reading

4. Reading analytically: Reading the text analytically a third time, focusing on the questions identified in step 3

5. Discussing as a class or analyzing individually: Finalizing the class discussion or individual analysis of the information gathered from step 4

6. Processing: Drawing conclusions

Each of the following chapters presents suggestions and teaching strategies for sharing the steps in the process with students and encouraging them to develop and deepen their abilities.

Summary

Close reading is a process of deep investigation into a text and the authorial choices therein. Although formalist ideas provide the method of analysis this book describes, the process is compatible with any number of critical lenses. This allows students to support their responses to a text with the solid evidence of literary devices. In subsequent chapters, we explore a six-step close reading process useful in all content areas. Students who master this process will not only find success in classwork and standardized tests but also develop the critical-thinking abilities essential for the rest of their lives.