Close Reading Strategies for high school English Courses: 5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

5 Brilliant Strategies for Better Close Reading

Close reading may be the most important skill we can teach our high school students.  It is a skill that can help them in almost any subject that involves reading and it is an essential life skill.  These strategies for close reading are great way to insure that our high school students are doing more than simply skimming a text.

Close Reading Strategies for high school English Courses:  5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

What is Close Reading?

Simply stated, close reading is rereading.  It is the idea that students go back into a text to notice not “what” the magic is, but “how” the author makes the magic happen. When students reread, closely, slowly, it gives them the opportunity look for imagery, repetition, figurative language and contrasts that they didn’t notice the first time through. Sometimes to really appreciate the magic, they need to read it dozens of times.

What does close reading mean:  5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

What Students Should Look For 

It’s important that student realize what they are looking for when they are practicing close reading.  On the first reading, they should focus on meaning.  What is the text saying?  What is it about about?  On subsequent readings, they should look for contrast, repetition, author’s craft (imagery, figurative language, structure, etc.). These are the aspects of the text that often take a second or third or fourth read.  Often, even experienced readers will not pick up on these during the first reading. This is the reason that it is important to have students focus on shorter texts when you are asking them to do close reading.

What if we are reading a full class novel?

You can still encourage your students to practice strategies for close reading.  Just direct them to focus on shorter passages.  Try to stick to 500 words or fewer.  Students will become overwhelmed if they are too much longer that that.

You can use most of these strategies for close reading of informational texts as well as close reading of fiction texts and poetry.

Close Reading Strategies for high school English Courses:  5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

5 Strategies for Close Reading in High School English

Student Lead Discussions

One of my favorite activities for AP Literature is to have students lead a close reading seminar.  I cannot take credit for this one but I have no idea where I first learned of it.

Have students select a passage of 500-800 words for a full class or book club text.  This works great when the text is available on-line. It makes it easier for students to prepare the text and the handouts.

Then students should write questions using AP Literature multiple choice stems without giving answer suggestions.  When students use the stems to develop the questions without providing answers, they become discussion questions.

Before the student-directed seminar, the other students in the class should read the passage and prepare answers to the questions.

Poem or Passage of the Week

When you give your students a poem or a very short passage that you return to over the course of a week, they are forced to practice rereading and reexamining a text to look for specific details.

In my AP Literature classes, we alternate between poem of the week and passage of the week.  The texts are selected to be seasonally appropriate and each day of the week has a prompt which begins on Monday with “read and annotate for meaning” and ends each week with a AP-style prompt for which they write only a thesis.

In between, the prompts may ask the students to examine characterization, figurative language, imagery, setting and/or detail.  We plan to spend about 10 minutes each class period on the text.  If it is a short week, I usually double up the prompts for Monday and Tuesday.

Join my subscriber list to get exclusive Poem of the Week or Passage of the Week.  Each month, one of my weekly emails will include a full week of close reading exercises.

Really Short Passages for Close Reading

This is a close reading exercise which emulates Nancy Dean’s Voice Lessons.  You can provide students with a passage that is as littles as a sentence and have them hone in diction, imagery, figurative language or other elements of voice.

I love to do these as extra credit assignments when we are working through plays by Shakespeare (check out Lessons in Close Reading for Hamlet and Close Reading for Macbeth).  I especially like to give them very famous passage in an effort to make them even more familiar with Shakespeare’s well known words.  

However, you could create these close reading exercises with any text.  Just choose a sentence or three and then ask two or three targeted questions.

Examples of questions that I like to use:

  • Identify the simile/metaphor/hyperbole/personification. What is being compared?  The effect of this comparison?
  • What is implied by x? How would it be different if they author has used y? What is the effect of this word choice? 
  • Want to try really short close reading passages for free?  Grab 5 exercises based on Ambrose Bierce short stories.
Close Reading Strategies for high school English Courses:  5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

Mnemonics for Close Reading

TP-CASTT or TP-FASTT

There are lots of mnemonic devices that students can use for close reading.  My favorite for poetry is TP-CASTT or TP-FASTT which stands for Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude, Title (again) and Theme.  Or the second version which is Figurative Language in place of connotation.  I actually prefer TP-FASTT because I think that students are more clear about what they are looking for with figurative language over connotation.  I use this strategy with all levels of students while doing close reading of poetry.

DIDLS

Another one that works really well for most students is DIDLS: Diction, Imagery, Details, Language and Structure.  This one is perfect for prose passages, although you could easily use it with poetry too.  The Visual Communications Guy has a great post about using this one.

FLIRTS

This is another good one for poetry:  Form, Language, Imagery, Rhyme & Rhythm, Tone and Structure.  This is a great one when you are looking to get the students to focus more fully on aspects of structure like the form as well as rhyme, rhythm, stanza, syntax and more.

DDRIFTS

This is a great one for focusing on elements of voice:  DDRIFT stands for Diction, Detail, Repetition, Imagery, Figurative Language, Tone, Syntax.  This works well with fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Use Collaborative Annotations for Close Reading

Another great way to encourage close reading is through collaborative annotations. These a group annotations that can be done in a variety of ways. For more on how to incorporate collaborative annotations as in your strategies for close reading, check out this post.

Close Reading Strategies for high school English Courses:  5 strategies to use with any text in grades 9-12.

Get Ready to Practice Some Close Reading Strategies

Close reading should be an integral part of any high school English class.  We practice close reading strategies in both AP Literature and English 11.  We combine weekly practice with our other units throughout the year.  Let me know in the comments below if you try any of these or have your own strategies for close reading that you love to use with your students.

If you are looking for other ideas about how to do close reading, be sure to check out how we use rereading and close reading in Poetry Slams and Four Ways to Teach Poetry Analysis. And for more on using mentor sentences to help students focus on close reading and its impact on their own writing, check out this post from Missy at A Better Way to Teach.

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Jeanmarie McLaughlin at McLaughlin Teaches English

Hi, I'm Jeanmarie!

I help AP Literature and High School English teachers create engaging classrooms so that students will be prepared college and beyond.

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