Every secondary English teacher has faced the mammoth task of trying to squeeze the teaching of a whole novel into as few as 14 lessons.

I’ll be the first to admit that learning how to do this well takes time. I recall with horror those evenings fresh out of the PGCE spent misguidedly creating mountains of worksheets and card sorts, which, admittedly, I now look back on with disdain.

I was not teaching my students how to read academically - I was simply getting them to regurgitate a story.

Driven to improve, I fumbled through pages of research on the subject and observed more experienced colleagues. Years later - and after exhausting strategies from some of education’s finest gurus - I still find myself cultivating my teaching of reading year after year.

Yet there is one thing that I have discovered in my journey to improve these novel schemes of work: if you get close reading right, everything else is made so much easier.

Close reading relies on pupils putting fragments of the text under the microscope and making observations. This then forms the building blocks for larger scale analysis. If close reading is planned well, it can improve students’ understanding of how to interpret meaning and lead to well-developed, self-assured responses to whole texts.

Consider outcomes

In order to plan a close reading, you need to consider what outcome you want for your pupils. Decide what is that you want them to learn, and carefully select an extract that will provide the opportunity for this: ideally one littered with a plethora analysable features, yet subtle enough to challenge their thinking. Decide which “fragments” of the text you want your pupils to explore, and carefully plan questions as stepping stones guiding them to that intended outcome.

So what questions should you be asking to ensure they are effectively examining the text? Well, it can be useful to examine language and structural fragments.

Asking comprehension questions about what specific words or phrases refer to is a useful way into a text - for example, “who is this metaphor describing?” or “what is this character hoping to achieve?” To answer them, students will need to look closely at the text to establish the meaning for themselves. They will need to figure out how these words and phrases sit within the context of the extract and what clues they give us.

To follow this, well-planned analytical questions exploring connotations of words, specific linguistic devices, or syntax in more depth can be valuable. Examples could include the following: “what do we associate with this word, and why has the writer chosen to use it to describe the building?”, “what is the effect of this simile here?” or “why does the writer extend the metaphor of drowning throughout the extract?” Cleverly worded questions will help bring the true depth of the writing and its skilful authorship to the forefront of your pupils’ minds.

‘Sustained use’

You may also wish your pupils to consider the impact of structure: asking what role a paragraph plays within an extract, whether a device can be identified at several different points of the extract, or whether there are any distinct turning points in a narrative and why. In my experience, structural analysis can be difficult for pupils as it involves them engaging with the text on a more complex level, so it is important to spend time exploring these ideas together with multiple texts and familiarising them with the concept of texts as constructs.

For me, close reading has been particularly effective with sustained use. Regular exposure to a range of well-planned questions, as well as high expectations of pupil responses to them, means that many can now autonomously close-read texts without much planning or intervention on my part.

Never again do I need to plan another worthless worksheet or could-be-better card sort: instead, I will continue to cultivate my teaching of close reading and prepare my students for GCSEs, A level and beyond.

Laura Tsabet is assistant head of English at Redbridge Community School in Southampton. She tweets @lauratsabet

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