English Online – http://english.unitecnology.ac.nz
Taha Moana - The Sea

Close Reading

Students need to become familiar with different text forms and recognise that these have different structures. They need to become familiar with:

·	the purpose of the text, 
·	the differences in language and structure, 
·	different ways of presenting information. 

Non Fiction texts - Reading for Information

Expose students to:

·	Resources that provide opportunities for students to discover, explore, and extend understandings and skills through cooperative or independent experiences. 

·	Resources that have a range of text forms and recording information - directions, instructions, questions & answers, diagrams, tables, charts, graphs, maps, codes/keys. Enable students to select, gather, sort, summarise and record information for themselves.  

Through reading, talking, exploring, and experimenting students can present their findings in a variety of visual texts such as maps, time lines, flow charts, venn diagrams, as well as a range of written texts such as explanations, instructions, reports, recounts, arguments, 

Teachers will be able to integrate literacy learning with learning in other areas of the curriculum. 

Develop confidence and competence in students, encourage and give support, model, guide, share, reflect, to develop INDEPENDENCE. 

Teachers should plan a balance of the following approaches throughout the unit. Shared Reading  - Guided Reading - Independent Reading - of selected, fiction or non-fiction texts, to demonstrate the ways structure assists the reader to gain information, using and discussing features such as title, table of contents, headings and subheadings, pictures and their captions, diagrams, index and glossary. 

Skills to develop through close reading of transactional texts (see transactional.rtf):questioning, summarising, analysing, making inferences, reflecting, imagining, hypothesising, sequencing, classifying, clarifying, predicting, interpreting. 

Encourage students to find and list verbs, effective adjectives, explicit nouns, adverbs, similes and metaphors that help achieve meaning/feeling. Talk about sentence structure, punctuation. 

Throughout the reading and writing programme there should be teacher modelling and student activities to develop the skills and strategies in the use of dictionaries, thesauri, and atlases. 

© Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand (First published 1998)