Resource | Teaching Ideas: Close Reading
The section Teaching Ideas is aimed at helping you with direct advice and practical tips which you can apply in your very next lesson. One area of this, I think is of real interest to all teachers. Looking at an extract in a classroom needs to be done successfully. In my experience, lessons can be taken away with assemblies and visitors as the term progresses, so when you have the full class in (no one in inclusion or off as it is their birthday - I kid you not) you want them to understand that extract within the confines of a lesson.
In this guide, our EnglishEdu Experts takes you by the hand and breaks it down for you - so you can break it down to others:
Close analysis of extracts – whether of known or previously unseen texts – is a key part of the assessment of English Literature (and the combined Language and Literature courses). It is also a difficult skill to master and therefore needs considerable classroom practice. Sometimes the task is to engage in ‘practical criticism’, selecting a range of interesting features of the text to arrive at an interpretation, while at other times, textual analysis needs to be focused more specifically: on the text’s relation to context; or on the development of a particular character, theme or motif in this scene; or on likely interpretations using literary theories.
There are activities here which are suitable for developing ‘prac crit’ skills and others which are more concerned with the focused approach. Equally, some tasks here are more suitable for unseen texts (whether that’s in relation to known texts or a studied context or not), while others are most effective for exploring extracts from set texts. Some of the ideas here are similar to some in the ‘practising linguistic analysis’ guide, while others can also be found in the guide to teaching poetry. The collections of ideas for developing analytical writing and for making good use of model essays will also provide some relevant ideas for this kind of work.
Link: EnglishEdu | Practising Literary Analysis
Categories: Weeklies
Tags: close reading, english language close analysis, english literature close analysis, english teaching ideas, englishedu teaching ideas, literary analysis, practising linguistic analysis, practising literary analysis,
