Close Reading with Middle and High Schoolers

How many times have you read a text with students and had the words flow beautifully? Maybe kids stumble on a word here and there, or you occasionally pause to define an unfamiliar term, but overall, the reading is smooth sailing—that is until you ask them what the text meant. There’s silence. Students glance at each other expectantly waiting for some brave soul to weigh in. When a student finally does, their answer’s wrong. They, and the rest of the class, are lost. “But they read so fluently and confidently,” you think. They may have, but there’s a big difference between reading and comprehending. 

It’s not just students who read without always understanding. Adults do too. Have you ever been reading a book for fun or a document for work, gotten to the bottom of the page, and realized that your mind had wandered off, maybe to your to-do list or upcoming vacation, and you got nothing?

As proficient readers, we know what to do in this situation. Reread and pay attention this time. But for many students, this isn’t a viable solution. They’re lost, not because their minds wandered, but because they are trying to read without comprehension skills.  

Despite lacking the skills to understand a secondary-school-level text, most 6th-12th grade kids have mastered phonics enough to read fluently and sound like proficient readers. Major gaps, however, remain before comprehension. Use close reading as one tool to bridge the chasm between sounding like a proficient reader and being one. 

There are many approaches to close reading, and they commonly include annotation, interrogation of key phrases, and making inferences based on the text. But before students make those moves toward comprehension and analysis, there are another couple of steps to take first.

At Zinc, we recommend starting close reading with conscious-reading practices to secure comprehension. Specifically, use two methods, Zinc-ing and Tracking. 

What is Zinc-ing? 

Zinc-ing is making meaning out of the words and bringing them to life. This involves two processes. We call the first, “Use Your Senses.” The easiest words to understand appeal directly to our senses. Always look for sensory details you can imagine. If you read the phrase, “a concert on the beach,” feel the sand, hear the music, smell the ocean breeze, and taste the salty air. 

The second Zinc-ing skill we teach is “Make It Real.” It’s easy to imagine sand on a beach, but more abstract words and phrases trip students up. ”Love of freedom” or “striving for excellence,” are harder to process. To comprehend these phrases, our brains connect them with vague or specific examples. “Love of freedom” may make us think of the excitement of getting a first car. “Striving for excellence” conjures a soccer player kicking the ball against the curb and running hills.

What is Tracking?

Tracking skills keep us connected to the writer’s meaning as we progress through a text. We pick up important signals from  transition words and punctuation, and track pronouns to keep comprehension going. When students miss transition words that signal contrast, like “however” and “but,” or those signaling continuation of an idea, like “thus” and “therefore,” they often lose the writer’s thread. Punctuation marks also offer clues on what’s to come. Not only colons but also dashes, semicolons and even commas,  often alert us to expect an explanation. This may all seem obvious to you, presumably a strong reader yourself, who probably knows all of this and acknowledges it unconsciously while reading. But for most students, explicit instruction in how to navigate a text with these transitions and punctuations is required.

The second part of Tracking is using pronouns. A common way students lose the thread of meaning is by failing to connect a pronoun to its antecedent. Most students comfortably navigate pronouns like “she,” “he” and “they,” connecting them  to the people they represent. But pronouns get a lot more complex in secondary-level texts. There are over 100 of them! Often, students miss identifying less common pronouns, and even more frequently, they lose a text’s meaning when they miss connecting a pronoun back to its antecedent. “You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength,” philosopher Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. Students need to note the pronoun “this” in that quote, and connect it back to its antecedent, that “you have power over your mind.” Only then can they make meaning out of this excerpt. 

What next?

Zinc’s conscious-reading approach gives students guidance on what to do while they read, taking them beyond the surface of the text. With these conscious-reading strategies in place, they can then move on to get even deeper into the text with close-reading practices, like annotation and looking for patterns.

What comes first?

It’s important to note that no close- or conscious-reading strategies will work if a text is way over a student’s head, and/or if they don’t have the vocabulary and background knowledge that they need for comprehension. Meanwhile, be sure to set your students up for success, and then get them Zinc-ing and Tracking!