5 Questions for Any Text: Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation

Now more than ever, students need the skills to determine whether the texts they encounter are trustworthy. 5 Questions for Any Text: Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation provides a simple framework for improving students’ critical reading skills by encouraging the development of original thoughts and responses to texts.

Marilyn Pryle suggests five specific questions that students can use with any text―print, online, video, or audio―to look beyond a text itself and see the influences around it, the voices and sponsors, the craft and rhetoric, the intent and message:

What am I reading?

What is it showing me?

What is it hiding?

How am I reacting?

How does it work?

Then, Marilyn provides a wide range of prompts and teaching suggestions to help you guide your students to deeper thinking about each of the questions. Students choose which idea they find most compelling to respond to in a given text, write brief responses to the text, and come to class with their own original thoughts, ready to contribute to and learn from discussions with peers. With constant, low-stakes practice, and with space to take risks, students develop the habits of critical questioning, of weighing other perspectives, and of building their own informed opinions. 

Student samples from a range of grade levels help you see the possibilities of finished reading responses, while classroom video shows you how this work unfolds.