Factual writing is a key macrogenre of American K-12 schooling that is also valued in workplace and society. This study examined the genre and register features of two subgenres of factual writing—biography and report—composed by 48 sixth-grade students in a curriculum unit on scientists and science-related careers aimed at developing students’ understanding of the nature of science. These texts were analyzed for a range of schematic, lexical, and grammatical features that instantiate the two target genres. Statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that the students demonstrated a fairly mature control over the schematic and lexical features that realize the purpose of either genre and relied heavily on the grammatical resources characteristic of everyday registers in constructing both genres. Additionally, there was a positive relationship between the students’ genre/register familiarity and the holistic quality of their writing, and the students’ reading proficiency was a significant predictor of their genre familiarity and holistic writing quality, but not their register understanding. These findings suggest that learning the grammatical resources characteristic of academic registers remains a major and potentially daunting task for many adolescents.

The Common Core State Standards accords great importance to close reading, but offers no specific guidelines for how it can or should be taught. This essay provides a critical review of existing instructional models of close reading and addresses issues related to their implementation in content area classrooms. It shows that current models of close reading offer different ways of engaging students in their interaction with complex texts, with some focusing on reading and rereading for understanding and others providing more intensive linguistic support. It argues that effective close reading practices must attend simultaneously to all key elements involved in the complex process of reading, including the reader, the text, the task, and the context, with a special emphasis on developing students’ understanding of how language and other semiotic systems construct meaning, embed ideology, and structure discourse in genre- and discipline-specific ways. The essay demonstrates that the contention about what close reading is and how it could be implemented stems from its varied interpretations by scholars with different theoretical and epistemological beliefs about reading, language, text, literacy, and schooling. It further suggests that an awareness of the critical issues that have been raised about close reading can help teachers avoid potential pitfalls and maximize effectiveness when implementing the practice.