During: Practicing Analysis
Students get better at analysis with practice. Whether they’re trying to make sense of a football play or the design of a football stadium, repetition is a key to developing analytical skill.
In approaching texts—whether the “text” is a paragraph, a poem, an advertisement, or a video—key skills in analysis are close reading and observation. Close reading doesn’t come naturally to many students; practice helps move students past a “read and done” mentality to a habit of rereading and digging deeper.
To give students practice in close reading, try this:
Present a short text to the class—for instance, a magazine ad, an opening paragraph, or a commercial.
Have students work in small groups to select key details—words from a text, literal descriptions of a picture, or patterns—that they think might be meaningful. Each group should list around ten.
Combine the words from all groups on the board. Then, ask students to work with a partner to draw an inference from the list. What overarching emotions or ideas emerge from the list as a whole?
As a class, share and discuss the inferences. Could you create a thesis statement about the meaning of the piece from these insights? If so, what might it be?
ELL Focus: Do This One Thing to Help
Inference is likely to be harder for English language learners (ELL) than others when dealing with verbal texts, but pictures bridge language. Try an inference activity that begins with the visual and allow students to write down important details in their own languages before composing their conclusive statements in English.
Discussion, Presentation, Technology, and Multimedia
Discuss. Analysis can occur on many levels. Close reading takes place microscopically; students must practice zooming in to the level of words in order to make sense of a text. But macroscopic, or “zooming out,” exercises are also valuable activities. Discussion is a critical vehicle for this level of comprehension and analysis. Small group discussion should happen frequently and can also take place at the end of a unit, novel study, or grading period.
Role Play. Consider role play as a means of asking students to analyze. Assign each student a character or historical figure, for instance, to represent in a discussion—students will have to use the same process of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions to portray a figure accurately.
Present. Presentation is often used for summative assessment, but consider using it as a formative assessment tool to spur on analysis. Have students present their initial selection of details and evidence (they might even make a slide presentation of these) and use the presentation to spark discussion with the class about possible conclusions.
Surf. Incorporate technology by having students analyze a website, paying particular attention to component parts, such as Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages, menus, and screen layout.
YouTube Moment: To use presentation as a formative tool for analysis, begin by having students work in pairs or groups and search for an important speech from American history on YouTube; include searches such as “MLK I Have a Dream speech,” “FDR Day of Infamy speech,” or “JFK Inaugural Address.” Conference with students or have them research online to give context to the speeches and scaffold their understanding. Then, have each group analyze the rhetoric and imagery of a speech and then present its findings to the class. After the presentations and any discussion they provoke, have students complete individual analyses of the speeches in the form of an essay, PowerPoint, or other written response.
After: Producing Analysis
Student Example 1: The Analytical Essay
By the end of his tenth grade year, Spencer was one of the top writers in his class. Naturally insightful about literature and abstract ideas to begin with, Spencer acquired skills during tenth grade that improved his ability to construct an essay—the ability to incorporate quotes more smoothly, for instance, and the ability to construct more complex sentences.
Nonetheless, the assignment to analyze a nonfiction text, William Faulkner’s short but thorny Nobel Prize acceptance speech, proved challenging. After grappling with some of the complicated ideas in the speech and discussing the historical context with his teacher, however, Spencer wrote a typically strong essay.
A key step in Spencer’s approach to the text was his annotation of the speech. Spencer’s teacher helped him move beyond simple highlighting to careful zooming in by suggesting he mark the following and then conferencing with him about his notes on the speech:
Words and phrases that convey more than a literal meaning
Shifts and transition words
Phrases that seem to sum up a big idea
Examples of unusual syntax, such as fragments or rhetorical questions
Student Example 2: Analyzing Visual Text
It was the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice that helped ninth grade student Gaby decide to read the book with a literature circle group in her English class. Once she did, however, she found the novel itself equally rewarding.
Gaby’s English teacher had planned the group reading selections to be sure that each book had an easy-to-find movie interpretation available. The assignment she gave—to watch a key scene and analyze it—could easily have been framed as a compare-and-contrast exercise (and would still have addressed the seventh common core reading standard). As a starting place, however, the teacher wanted Gaby and her peers to focus closely on the craft of the video itself, not merely on plot differences.
After modeling a “close reading” of a movie scene with her students and discussing choices made by the director and actors, Gaby’s teacher made an anchor chart—a reference tool for the class that could be posted on the wall as an ongoing reminder—of video techniques and tools and placed it on her wall.
Then, she had the students get to work. Here is Gaby’s response:
The movie exaggerates Lizzy’s resistance to Mr. Collins in the scene where he proposes. The actress holds onto Jane’s arms and begs her not to go, and she mouths “please” to her father as her final plea before they all leave her alone with Mr. Collins. Mr. Collins also gives Lizzy a wildflower in the movie, which symbolizes his simple love for her; however, Lizzy does not want simple love; she wants a complex and deep connection. In the novel, Lizzy sits patiently and listens to the proposal, but in the movie, she constantly tries to interrupt. The camera frames Lizzy awkwardly in the center of the shot for the first part of the scene and then cuts to an over-the-shoulder view when Mr. Collins kneels to propose—she freaks out when he kneels in front of her; then she cuts him short and storms out of the room. Because of the assertiveness and anger that the movie Lizzy portrays, the audience is supposed to understand all of the forcefulness of her character. Through the novel, readers interpret Lizzy’s refusal however they want to, but the movie makes her sound very forceful, strong, and independent. I think the directors/producers wanted the audience to know that Lizzy is not the typical “I want to get married and have a steady