Using WhatsApp to Teach Close Reading: The Case of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief

This article explores the use of the instant messaging app, WhatsApp, to teach close reading, critical thinking, and argumentation skills. Academic and argumentative essays continue to be the dominant form of both formative and summative assessments, particularly in literary studies. However, many students who enter university in South Africa struggle with academic writing, particularly in the form of academic essays, to make arguments about literary texts. Owing to the dominance of essays and the difficulties that students face with regard to close reading and argumentation, we conceptualised a dialogic learning task with the aim of improving these skills. Students were required to have a debate on WhatsApp about a polarising topic that was based on a character from the novel The Book Thief. The concept of dialogic learning informed our intervention, and we found that engaging in dialogue using WhatsApp resulted in advancing students’ close reading and argumentation skills.