Should We Still Teach Close Reading?
Blast from the Past: The Common Core State Standards introduced the idea of “close reading,” in elementary reading instruction. I wrote a version of this entry on June 18, 2012, hoping to explain a concept that was new to many puzzled teachers. Since then, some states have revised or replaced their English Language Arts standards, which has shifted attention away from close reading. This blog entry represents an extensive revision of the earlier version.
The Common Core State Standards encouraged teachers to engage students in “close reading.” Not surprising, I received lots of letters asking me to define or explain what close reading is.
The idea of close reading is to make sense of a text – to figure it out, to solve it like a problem. As such, close reading requires a substantial emphasis on guiding readers to read high-quality texts, texts with a lot of depth.
This "figuring out" is accomplished entirely by reading and discussing the text itself. Accordingly, teacher provided information or textbook commentary is minimized. You want as little between the reader and the text as possible.
Because challenging texts do not give up their meanings easily, it’s essential that readers re-read such texts. Of course, not all texts are worth the trouble of close reading.
Close reading requires that readers accomplish a series of goals.
One way to think about close reading is as a series of readings or rereadings (Adler & Vand Doren, 1972), each with its own goal.
So, a first reading has the goal of determining what the text says. It’s purely an issue of reading comprehension. If the text is a story, then students should be able to retell the plot. If the text is a science chapter, then readers should be able to summarize the text and answer questions about its key ideas and details. This is where reading comprehension instruction has traditionally stopped.
A second reading has a different goal: readers must understand how the text worked. How did the author organize it? What literary devices were used and how effective were they? What was the quality of the evidence? If data were presented, how was that done? Why did the author choose this word or that word? Was the meaning of a key term consistent or did it change as one progressed through the text?
This second reading might be a total re-reading or a partial and targeted re-reading of key portions, but it would not be aimed at determining what the text said – that would have already been accomplished by this point.
The value of this rereading may be more obvious with some texts than others. For instance, when one reads a political speech or a persuasive essay, it can be worthwhile to analyze the word choices and types of evidence upon which the author has depended. This can facilitate a critical examination of the ideas, and a grasp of why the text may be convincing.
Or, in a piece of literary fiction it may allow the reader to gain an understanding of how the beauty or power of the text was achieved. The author’s diction may imply important information about a plot or character. Of Mice and Men includes the following description: “Lennie dabbled his big paw in the water.” Paw is a synonym for hand, of course, but why that synonym? (It seems to say Lennie is like a large gentle animal, and there are other examples in the text that reinforce and extend this idea).
That second reading goal is to try to identify those kinds of unstated meanings that may underlie a text.
A third reading – a third goal – takes one even deeper. What does this text mean? What was the author’s point? What does it have to say to me about my life or my world? How do I evaluate the quality of this work—aesthetically, substantively? How does this text connect to other texts that I have read? By waiting until we have accomplished a deep understanding of a text – of what it says and how it works — we are in the right position intellectually and ethically to critically evaluate a text and to connect it with other texts.
Basically, close reading is an intensive analysis of a text with the purpose of determining what it says, how it says it, and what it means.
The idea of multiple readings is metaphorical. One may read a text only once – and in some cases that would be sufficient to accomplish all three of these goals. Other texts may take more than three readings or partial readings to get there.
Close reading centralizes those three goals and emphasizes that they are to be accomplished not by seeking information elsewhere, but by reading and rereading the text.
This brief description of the essentials of close reading (e.g., intense emphasis on text, figuring out the text by thinking about the words and ideas in the text, minimization of external explanations, multiple and dynamic rereading, multiple purposes that focus on what a text says, how it says it, and what it means or what its value is), should raise a number of questions for teachers.
Should I give the students a preview of a text?
No, you probably should not provide much of a preview. At least not in the ways that we usually preview texts in the classroom, with picture walks, guiding the kids' steps through the text, pointing key things out to them, and so on. The problem with at least some previews is that they aim to get the readers to end up with certain information from the text. It’s not unreasonable to encourage students to look a text over but be careful not to guide them to any particular point of view or to notice anything that you believe to be important. Give them a chance to figure that out.
Is it okay to set a purpose for student reading?
Yes, if the purpose is general (e.g., read to find out about these animals, read to find out how this character deals with hard choices). It is essential that this purpose setting does not reveal a lot of information about the text. Students should gain that information from reading the text itself.
What about prior knowledge preparation?
Getting students to activate what they know about a topic is a way of increasing their comprehension of a text. Likewise, teachers may assume that kids lack information that might be relevant, so they spend time preparing kids by trying to increase their knowledge. However, when the teacher makes those decisions they are making them based on the interpretation of the text they have already done.
Imagine a teacher preparing kids to read “Little Red Riding Hood,” and she wants to start out with a discussion of why it is important that we do what our parents tell us. That discussion might be helpful in terms of getting kids to interpret the story in a specific way, but it leads them to an interpretation rather than allowing them to form their own views of the story.
I think it is reasonable to provide prior knowledge preparation often, but it would be better for a close reading lesson for the teacher to leave that out. When I’ve taught close reading lessons, I’ve skip the prior knowledge preparation at the beginning, but if the discussions of the first reading leads me to believe that the kids are missing key information, I will provide that information and guide the students to reread those relevant parts. That’s one of the benefits of rereading – you can have the students try something on their own and if they can’t manage it, you can intervene with more scaffolding.
That’s not to say that I would never provide any relevant information about a text ahead of time.
I was looking at an article on forest fires that began: "It is only partly true that 'only you' can prevent forest fires." That’s a cute beginning, but my guess is that a typical second grader is not going to recognize its source (the quote is a line of Smokey the Bear from a once-common public service announcement). I would choose to explain the source of that quote before the students tried to make sense of the article.
At our school, close reading requires lots of annotation and note taking?
Annotating a text can be useful, especially if you want to do a targeted reread in which you just go back to certain sections of the text for some reason. Notes can identify certain kinds of information or simply may take you back to an interesting wording or a repetition of an idea that might signal its importance. However, as valuable as annotating can be, it is not a central pillar of close reading, and I think that its use has been overblown in lots of classrooms. Too often the notetaking seemed to be the point of the reading, rather than accomplishing those goals. Too much notetaking and too many annotation categories can become onerous and distract from the reading.
Does close reading require that every text is read in this fashion?
No, not every text merits a close reading. Some texts should still be read only once – it will depend upon the depth and value of the text. If it is meaty, indeed, multiple readings would be worthwhile. Also, kids need to learn more about comprehension than how to do a close read. You need to pick your spots when you are teaching this.
Is close reading the best way to read text?
There are multiple ways of reading text. I think getting students to dig into how a text accomplishes its purposes or gains its power has great value, so close reading is worth introducing to kids. Nevertheless, there are other kinds of reading that students should also be exposed to.
For instance, historians tend to engage in more “author centered” readings. They not only consider what is in a text. They think about what else this author or speaker had to say on the topic. Was the author consistent? Did the information change? Who was the audience of the text and did that make any difference? When was the text created – at the point where the relevant incident occurred or years later? This often requires something that is considered a no-no in close reading: the historian will often read multiple texts to make sense of a given text, rather than isolating this text and thinking only of what it says.
The idea of trying to read the author through the text in this way allows one to gain a deep understanding of the text. Again, an approach that has great value.
Science reading is different, too. Trying to grasp the aesthetic qualities of the text or the perspectives of the author are rarely the point of reading a scientific work. Like the close reader, scientists tend to read and reread a text again and again. The scientist doesn’t have three goals. The rereading is to accomplish that first goal – understanding what the text says – and the rereading is needed because of the density of the information usually presented in scientific works.
The scientist, like the historian, tends to do a lot of comparing. The scientist must make lots of comparisons within a text – connecting the words, graphics, and mathematical representations of the concepts, unlike the historian who may be working with several different texts.
These descriptions of different kinds of reading overdo it a bit when it comes to distinguishing the types of reading that English professors, historians, and scientists do. These distinctions are based on the most central forms of reading these experts engage in, but there are times when historians engage in close reading or when scientists or literary critics must compare multiple texts.
All these types of reading have value, and instruction should familiarize students with each of them.
Is there evidence that teaching close reading improves reading achievement?
No, there are not studies comparing close reading with traditional ways of guiding students’ reading comprehension (Bogaerds-Hazenberg, Droop, & van Steensel, 2026; Welsch, Powell, & Robnolt, 2019). Close reading – and these other reading approaches – may make students more aware of certain aspects of text and reading, and they may provide students with some useful tools for studying certain kinds of texts. But there are no studies that teaching any of these improves general reading comprehension as typically measured by standardized reading tests.
Usually, I do not make recommendations that are not research based. However, I don’t see close reading as a method for teaching reading. It is more of a desired outcome, a curricular goal. I want students to see text as a unity – that it carries meaning both in what it says and how it says it. I want them to be able to critically analyze why a text may be appealing or convincing – both so they can appreciate the power of text, but also so they can resist being manipulated. I don’t know whether practicing these activities will have a sufficient impact to guarantee those outcomes, but they are outcomes that I believe we should strive for. Hence, my embrace of close reading. Yes, I think it still has a place in the elementary curriculum.
References
Adler, M., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to read a book. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S., Droop, M., & van Steensel, R. C. M. (2026). Still too close to call: A literature review on close reading interventions and their effects on reading outcomes in grades 3–9. Reading Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2026.2644958
Welsch, J. G., Powell, J. J., & Robnolt, V. J. (2019). Getting to the core of close reading: What do we really know and what remains to be seen? Reading Psychology, 40(1), 95-116. https://doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2019.1571544
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