A Closer Look at Close Reading: Three Under‐the‐Radar Skills Needed to Comprehend Sentences

Abstract

This article reveals subtle, often-ignored text features affecting comprehension and provides engaging strategies for maintaining a thread of comprehension at the sentence level.L ike many teachers across the United States, Teresa (all names are pseudonyms), a fifthgrade teacher in Florida, has been working on close reading with her students. In many ways, the instruction has deepened her practice. With extended time to read and reread texts, annotate passages, and model thinking, Teresa has been able to challenge students to higher levels of analysis and reflection. But recently, in working with her class, Teresa discovered that she was making assumptions about their understanding.The class was reading an article about the demise of the dinosaurs, a one-page piece describing three causes of extinction: an asteroid blast, decreases in herbivore populations, and a heating of the earth. As Theresa was pushing for students to analyze word choices, summarize paragraphs, and relate sentences to the sections of text, she soon learned that they were not making connections between sentences or even understanding complex sentences with diverse constructions. For example, in one sentence, the writer used an appositive to give readers the more scientific term for plant eaters and to describe them: "The plant-eating Triceratops, gentle herbivores, were finding less and less food available." Students did not pick up on the appositive construction or understand that Triceratops and "gentle herbivores" were the same.In another section, sentences across a paragraph used different terms to refer to the Tyrannosaurus rex. In one sentence, they were "carnivores," and in another, they were "meat-eating beasts." This was even harder because, with the separation of a sentence, students could not carry forward an understanding that the term meat-eating beasts was being substituted for carnivores. They did not understand this anaphoric relationship. Even connective words such as although, however, and despite were tripping students up. Teresa saw that students could make sense of sentences using direct explanations (e.g., "The Tyrannosaurus rex was a meat-eating carnivore") but could not comprehend more implicit relationships."What I realized," explained Teresa, "was that I was not going to get anywhere with close reading until my students understood how to handle these sentence-level issues. I was putting the cart before the horse, and I needed to back up." As a former third-grade teacher/university faculty member and a former kindergarten and fifth-grade teacher, we have noticed the same thing in our work with schools. With the current rage for close reading and its press for word choice scrutiny, rereading, and annotating, lessons are assuming basic sentence-level comprehension, overlooking the obvious. To meet the goals of Anchor Standard 5 of the Common Core State Standards and create a new and deeper level of reading, students must be explicitly taught how to use specific structures to make inferences at the sentence level (i.e.,...

The Science of Reading Comprehension Instruction

“…A student reading the woodchuck passage and encountering the sentence “It is a complex system of entrances, tunnels, and rooms called chambers” (McCarron, 2000/2005, p. 16), for example, might need support to analyze the sentence and understand that “chambers” refers just to the rooms, not to the entrances, tunnels, and rooms as a group. Teaching students to recognize and analyze certain sentence structures, such as anaphora, or “when one word or group of words replaces another within a sentence or across sentences” (Mesmer & Rose‐McCully, 2018, p. 452), has been shown to improve students’ ability to answer related comprehension questions about both narrative and expository texts (Baumann, 1986). Instruction in sentence combining, a common practice in writing instruction, has also shown some significant effects on students’ performance on standardized tests of reading achievement (Wilkinson & Patty, 1993).…”

Exploring teacher and student knowledge of sentence‐level language features

“…Academic sentences are often dense and complex, and they utilize sentence‐level features unique to academic texts. Sentence‐level features, such as connectives, anaphora, and appositives (Mesmer & Rose‐McCully, 2018), convey relationships between ideas, recall and restate previous information and ideas, and give additional information. Although academic writers use many other features to craft the kinds of sentences that are characteristic of academic texts, these specific features (see Table 1) were chosen as the focus of this PL inquiry because of their frequency in academic texts across elementary and middle school grade levels (Crosson & Lesaux, 2013a; Mesmer & Rose‐McCully, 2018).…”

“…There are also a number of practitioner‐focused suggestions for sentence‐level instruction. These practices include think‐alouds and explicit discussions of sentence‐level features and their meaning and functions, annotation to encourage close reading (e.g., to trace anaphoric references), exploring synonyms or substitutions of words or phrases that make up a sentence‐level feature, sentence combining, and generating examples using the target sentence‐level feature (Crosson & Lesaux, 2013a; Mesmer & Rose‐McCully, 2018). To strengthen instruction at the academic sentence level, researchers have urged teachers and researchers to further explore the effectiveness of such practices through empirical studies (MacKay et al, 2021; Truckenmiller et al, 2019).…”

Getting KnERDI with Language: Examining Teachers’ Knowledge for Enhancing Reading Development in Code‐Based and Meaning‐Based Domains

“…As people read, they use their expectations for sentence structure, largely derived from their spoken language development, to help them assemble words into meaningful ideas (Castles et al, 2018; Kendeou et al, 2016). This knowledge includes awareness of how connective words signal relations among ideas within and across sentences to support text‐based inferences (Mesmer and Rose‐McCully, 2018). Text structure is included in our model of teacher knowledge because readers can also use their sensitivity to the organizational patterns in written text to support their understanding of an author’s message (Roehling et al, 2017).…”