The Modern Language Association report and Profession issue from summer 2007 (Geisler et al., 2007) are highly indicative of the increasingly debated concerns in the profession surrounding (1) the traditional division of foreign language curriculum between “language” and “literature” and (2) the instruction of textual analysis (or practice of close reading) in the student‐centered literature classroom. In this article, I discuss the need in the profession to address the contemporary problems inherited from the traditional “language‐literature” divide and postulate the use of close reading as a tactic to overcome this traditional divide. This article specifically addresses the issue of “why” and “how” to teach students textual analysis meaningfully and communicatively in the foreign language classroom and then proposes and demonstrates the use of input and output activities as a pedagogical strategy.