Margin Notes

“A Closer Look at Close Reading: Three Under-the-Radar Skills Needed to Comprehend Sentences” by Heidi Anne Mesmer and M.M. Rose-McCully (The Reading Teacher, 2017)

“Close reading requires unpacking the implicit relationships within and across sentences. However, beyond the close-reading rage, students need to understand the ways writers cleverly use structures to add interest, description, and parsimony to their writing.”

Summary

In this article, Mesmer and Rose-McCully, highlight the impact of sentence-level comprehension on overall reading comprehension. They focus on three specific sentence constructions that can be taught explicitly to support students’ understanding of text.

1. Anaphora is when one word or group of words replaces another within a sentence or across sentences. Pronouns are the simplest kinds of anaphoric relationships. The word(s) being replaced in anaphoric relationships are called antecedents because they come before the replacing words. Authors use anaphora for description, variety, and parsimony in their writing.
2. Connectives explicitly link one clause to another (for example and, but, that, and which) or connect two adjacent sentences (such as however or thus). Because different connectives suggest different relationships, they signal to the reader that they must make a text-based inference.
3. Appositives are nouns, noun phrases, or noun clauses that are set off by commas and immediately follows a noun. An appositive renames the noun and provides more information about it.

 

Takeaways For the Classroom

The authors provide a variety of practical strategies for explicitly teaching and practicing each structure:

Anaphora

• Model and practice using highlighters to identify pronoun replacements and colour-code their relationships.
• Create Mad-Lib style games for students to fill in nouns or pronouns.
• Provide students with sentences containing pronoun replacements and have them work in small groups to creative descriptive noun replacements for the pronouns while maintaining the anaphoric relationships.

Connectives

• Create cloze activities by giving students a portion of text they will be reading with the connectives removed. Ask them to select connectives from a bank of options based on the context of the sentence.
• Provide students with sentence parts and have them work in partnerships to join them with connectives.
• Practice sentence combining by having students use connectives to combine shorter sentences into a longer complex sentence.

Appositives

• Provide students with sentences containing lengthy or multiple appositives. Ask them to cross out the appositives and see if they can make meaning from the sentence without it.
• Invite students to create a list of nouns they can use to describe themselves and then write a descriptive paragraph using appositive phrases.
• Create appositive poetry by asking students to pick an object and write a four-line poem about it using appositive phrases.

Conclusion

“…we have come to see connectives, appositives, and anaphora as being crucial to sophisticated reading and writing in the upper grades and beyond…students must use these structures in their own writing, transfer their knowledge to authentic materials, and begin to spot the clever ways that writers use these tools.”