“distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112).

This activity also offers a way to encourage students to reread without the trap of having the second reading become the instructor reading.


Although adherents of close reading have argued that one of its main goals is to foster independent readers (Shanahan, 2014), in practice, close reading can do the opposite, creating situations in which students read the text once to prove that they have read, but then wait for the instructor to reveal its true meaning. Certainly, educators can create situations in which students become responsible for these second and third readings and thus slowly gain confidence in their ability to examine texts not just according to what is being said but why and what the implications are, but they must do so with care to avoid the kind of trap that Bialostosky (2006) and others have discussed (see also Beers & Probst, 2013).


Moreover, as Bialostosky (2006) argued, it is often in these second or third readings that teachers reveal to students the “true meaning of the text,” teaching students to “distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112). That is, instructors need to be careful that the first reading does not become the student reading, and the second and third readings belong to the instructor, decreasing students’ motivation for reading even further.




The guides described in this section also focus solely on intensive reading practices, which McConn (2016) described as “reading the minimum number of texts required by the syllabus with a focus on the details” (p. 164) at the expense of extensive reading practices, defined by Carrell and Carson (1997) as “rapid reading of large[r] quantities of material...for general understanding” (p. 50). This is in spite of a lack of empirical evidence to support the former (Carrell & Carson, 1997; Hinchman & Moore, 2013; McConn, 2016).