Drawing expertise and ideas from research, as well as teachers from across the country, Every Reader, a Close Reader serves as both an instructional guide and professional development tool for classroom teachers and instructional leaders to use when starting or strengthening close reading at the classroom level.

The Common Core State Standards have put close reading in the spotlight as never before. While middle and high school teachers want and need students to connect with, analyze, and learn from both literary and informational texts, many are unsure how to foster the skills students must have in order to develop deep and nuanced understanding of complicated content. Is there a process to follow? How is close reading different from shared reading and other common literacy practices? How do you prepare students to have their ability to analyze complex texts measured by high-stakes assessments? And how do you fit close reading instruction and experiences into an already crowded curriculum? * Text complexity and how to determine if a particular text is right for your learning purposes and your students. * The process and purpose of close reading, with an emphasis on its role in developing the 21st century thinking, speaking, and writing skills essential for academic communication and college and career readiness. * How to plan, teach, and manage close reading sessions across the academic disciplines, including the kinds of questions to ask, texts to use, and supports to provide. * How to assess close reading and help all students—regardless of linguistic, cultural, or academic background—connect deeply with what they read and derive meaning from complex texts. Equipping students with the tools and process of close reading sets them on the road to becoming analytical and critical thinkers—and empowered and independent learners. In this comprehensive resource, you’ll find everything you need to start their journey.

Many literacy experts believe close reading has the power to create strong, independent readers, but what does that really mean, and how does it work in the classroom? This book is your must-have guide to getting started! It provides step-by-step strategies and scaffolds for teaching close reading and improving students’ comprehension of complex texts. You will learn how to teach close reading based on text type, how to accelerate learning through increasingly challenging texts in both print and digital media, how to use close reading as a springboard for close talks and close writes, and how to support your students to move forward confidently with a repertoire of tools to employ as they navigate complex text in their daily lives. Special Features: A clear explanation of what text complexity really means and how it varies by student An easy-to-use framework for creating a close reading lesson that builds student reading stamina Scaffolds to help students at all ability levels to do a close reading Close reading strategies for a variety of literary and informational genres Ideas for strengthening reading through targeting comprehension skills, including analyzing text structure and evaluating arguments Suggestions for helping students read with increasing levels of rigor Techniques for how to lessen student technology distractions and dig deeper into digital text Guidelines and procedures for close talks – purposeful, focused discussions about text Procedures for close writes that vary based on genre and student ability level Recommendations to ensure students have the close reading skills to be effective readers in and out of the classroom In addition, each chapter includes study guide questions to help you apply the ideas in the book to your own classroom. With this practical book, you will have all the tools you need to make close reading a reality!

The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed--even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read. Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.

Close Reading New Media is the first publication to apply the method of close analysis to new media.Since the early nineteen-nineties, electronic art and literature have continually gained importance in artistic and academic circles. Significant critical and theoretical attention has been paid to how new media allow the text to break traditional power relations and boundaries. The passive reader becomes an active participant choosing his own path and assembling not just his own interpretation of the text (level of the signified), but also his own text (level of the signifier). Texts no longer have a beginning or an ending, being a web of interlinked nodes. The decentered nature of electronic text empowers and invites the reader to take part in the literary process. Poststructuralist theorists predicted a total liberation of textual restrictions imposed by the medium of print. However, while these are culturally significant claims, little attention has been paid to their realization. The goal of this volume is twofold. Our aim is to shed light on how ideas and theories have been translated into concrete works, and we want to comment on the process of close reading and how it can be applied to electronic literature. While all contributions deal with particular works, their aim is always to provide insight into how electronic fiction and new media can be read.This book proposes close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland.

Explore the what, why, and how of close reading to give students in grades 3–5 the tools they need to be successful. In this must-have guide, teachers will learn the key elements of a close reading lesson as well as strategies for analyzing and selecting a text and how to support students based on their progress and performance. The included lesson template will allow teachers to not only use the provided lessons and texts but also create their own. Correlated to standards, this book includes grade-specific sample close reading lessons and digital copies of teacher and student resources.

Techniques of Close Reading is a brief, supplemental text that trains students in an ability to see what texts--be they written, oral, visual, or mediated--may be saying. Renown scholar and teacher Barry Brummett explains and explores the various ways to "read" messages (speeches, cartoons, magazine ads, etc.), teaching students the ability to see deeper levels of meaning and to share those insights with others. Techniques of Close Reading differs from other books in rhetorical criticism, textual analysis, or critical thinking by: - Focusing on the act and techniques of criticism rather than on schools of thought, grand theories, and specific methods, thus helping students to engage in the act of critical close reading in ways that are congenial to a wide range of methods (for that reason, it is highly adaptable to other texts currently in use that are focused on specific methods) - Explaining the relationships among theory, methods, and techniques of rhetorical criticism - Examining the ethics and risk of doing and reading rhetorical criticism via plenty of examples, figures, and exercises taken from everyday life