By Chong Bretillon
Often during sessions with students who are working on literature assignments, I’ll peek over at the text and see copious textual markup in the student’s native language. Beautifully-written Chinese characters sit to the left and right of the original English lines, their meaning unknown to me; words in the Korean Hangul alphabet, which appear like neat little blocks, appear set off by arrows at specific words in each phrase. Sometimes, I do understand a few of the markings—if they’re in Spanish or French, for instance—I’ve seen simple definitions of terms; imperative verbs such as “remember this;” universal markings such as dates that presumably link a word or a line to another day’s notes; and of course, exclamation and question marks. The practice of annotating an excerpt of a text is fundamental to any close reading, and for multilingual students, these markings hold so much meaning for our collaboration together, inspiring a discussion of the visualization of close reading as a transcultural practice.
According to a one of the excellent resources on close reading on our writing resources website, Harvard’s “How to Do a Close Reading,” the act of close reading involves moving from reader to writer—in order to pay attention to our observations and to use our inductive reasoning to suggest what these observations mean. The resource advises that students should practice close reading with the aid of a pencil—and actively write down “anything that strikes you as surprising or significant, or that raises questions—as well as making notes in the margins.”
For multilingual students, the act of note-taking can be a comprehensive production task that requires students to make connections and leaps not only within the target language (the language of the given text) but between languages. Students draw on multiple knowledge sources when they read a text; what might seem “surprising” or “significant” is not universal, especially if the visual cues in a text or its rhetorical organization is remarkably different from a typical text of the same genre in the student’s native language/culture. Moreover, texts that contain culturally-embedded viewpoints—and most do—such as the vocabulary that conveys images of the American West in the Harvard close reading sample text, requiring another layer of transcultural understanding.
Thus, I have found it useful to engage students’ note-taking and marking in their native languages as a way to jump into a conversation about their thought process as they work toward a deeper understanding of a text. The verbs, adjectives, phrases, and collocations that students underline and highlight, define, compare, and so forth can serve as starting points for further discussion of a text’s meaning and significance.
Published March 31, 2016
