Colleen McQuay and Dawan Coombs, English

Introduction

The Common Core State Standards call for students to be better able to comprehend and close read literature when it states that students will be able to “read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it.”¹ However, even though this is what the standards are calling for, the concern is how educators can better teach and aid students in gaining skills that will contribute to increased close reading and comprehension. While research upholds the importance of these skills for academic and career success,² it lacks in discussing the implementation of strategies to help students increase reading comprehension and close reading.

Methodology

During my student teaching experience, I offered to my students to be a part of a study in which they would be using three strategies to help improve their reading comprehension and close reading skills. The entire class chose to participate. During the study, I introduced the three strategies at the beginning of our study of The Great Gatsby. The strategies included logographic cues, thinkmarks, and character cards.

Logographic cues are a collection of small visual symbols that students use to help them clarify what is happening in the text, as well as an idea of the direction the text is taking. Generally, these logographic cues are used to portray symbols and themes in the text. Students were each given a pad of small sticky notes, on which students drew their graphic and placed in their books. Character cards are index cards on which students write physical and personality information about characters, as well as important quotes. Lastly, thinkmarks are bookmarks students kept in their novels, which listed a number of ways for students to make connections with the text, which they were required to make for each chapter of the novel.

Students were required to make ten logographic cues and thinkmarks for each chapter of The Great Gatsby, and also keep character cards for the entirety of the novel. While students were reading, I issued a number of check-in assignments to assess their close reading and comprehension of the novel.

Results

The nature of working with students as test subjects can be difficult; for example, there are instances in which students do not complete their work. Unfortunately, during this study, the thinkmarks and character cards were unsuccessful. However, despite the lack of success with those two strategies, the results with the logographic cues were very positive.

Using logographic cues, students were able to read deeply to not only understand the themes in >The Great Gatsby, but also the symbols. In a short in-class writing assignment, students were asked to track the progress of one of the themes or symbols from the novel that they had identified. Students used their logographic cues to find instances in the novel of symbols and themes such as love, color, social class, money, weather, and so on.

This exercise, as well as a number of discussions concerning theme and symbol, showed that students were able to use the strategy of logographic cues to better analyze and understand the more difficult aspects of literature, therefore fulfilling standards concerning close reading and comprehension. What is staggeringly more positive, however, was the students’ desire to use logographic cues in the future, even with different types of reading. Students expressed that they would be interested in using this strategy not only in novels concerning symbols and themes, but also for informational texts, in order to keep track of different aspects.

Discussion

As an educational study, it can often be frustrating, and even discouraging, working with adolescents. As mentioned within the results section of this paper, I was unable to come to any conclusions with the thinkmarks and character cards strategies, due to student incompletion. Teacher research requires flexibility in this way; the subjects are students, and therefore, the “classwork” or “homework,” which in this case was the bulk of the study, can go unfinished. However, this is not to discourage others from not only studying, but also using these strategies in the classroom to help students better prepare for the task of close reading and comprehension. What can certainly be improved in a similar study would be the teaching practices; finding ways in which to encourage and help the students to complete the necessary learning activities and assignments will yield additional results that would be helpful when it comes to measuring the effectiveness of reading strategies.

Conclusion

Overall, educators, especially those in the English field, must realize that students cannot simply learn comprehension and close reading without guidance. The greatest importance in teaching students strategies to help with these skills is the student ability to transfer these strategies to other pieces of writing. Although the logographic cues strategy was extremely successful while students were reading The Great Gatsby, it was a true success to see that students were able to transfer the strategy to another class and type of text.

Logographic cues which show students’ graphic representations of The Great Gatsby’s symbols and themes. The logographic cues lined up with the section of text that correlates.

References

1. Common Core State Standards, 2010.
2. Cronin, Mariam Karis. “The Common Core of Literacy and Literature.” English Journal 103.4 (2014): 46-52.; Hinchman, Kathleen A. and David W. Moore. “Close Reading: A Cautionary Interpretation.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 56.6 (2013): 441-450.