Annotating Texts

Although there are many things involved in teaching English effectively, the process of helping students to access, think about and respond to challenging texts is one of the most important.

Annotations can unlock complex texts, providing students with examples, explanations and links to other, relevant and connected ideas.

Here are some ideas that may help with this aspect of the job.

Have two copies of the text

Whether you are teaching a poem, an extract or an article on some interesting and useful background knowledge that will help broaden students’ understanding of an idea, having two copies can be really useful. Pre-planning your questions and annotations on the one copy means that you can then use it as an aide-memoire in the lesson. I will often have my pre-annotated text next to the one that I am annotating under the visualiser to remind me what to focus on when teaching.

Fully complete all tasks so you understand what is required

If you are teaching an article that explores the idea of a tragic hero, perhaps to help students better understand this literary convention and therefore apply it when writing about Macbeth, you may ask students to answer text dependent questions about the text so that they can demonstrate their understanding of what they are reading. Completing the questions yourself before the lesson will help you to focus your explanations and annotations in the lesson. If they really need to understand the complex sentence on line 15, this will be a useful focus for annotations.

Annotate bit by bit

I teach using a visualiser and display my text on the projector to the class. In order to avoid the split-attention effect, I add a couple of annotations (sometimes my ideas, sometimes the ideas of students) while students pay attention and watch. I then ask students to add the annotations to their text before asking them to put their pens down and direct their attention back to the board again.

Teach Everything Needed for Success in Writing

After discussing and annotating a text, students will often write about it in order to develop their ideas and interpretations. Depending on the class or the text, the annotation process may be more teacher or student led but the goal should be to ensure that all students are able to write about the text. If they struggle with the writing, it may be that you haven’t helped them to understand enough of what they have read.

Think out Loud

Modelling annotation for a class is a means of developing their conception of what a reader (and writer) could focus on when grappling with a text. Narrating your thought process with regards to why something is interesting or striking can be really helpful. ‘This phrase seems odd: it doesn’t really fit the general mood’. ‘This line is interesting, giving a sense of…..’ ‘There seems to be a pattern here’

Board=Paper (TLAC)

If I am leading students through a tricky text, I may tell the class that ‘you need to add all of the annotations I am making but you can of course add additional ideas‘. This approach has a number of benefits. It can help to ensure that students are paying attention. It can also ensure that all students have useful explanatory information about the text, helping them to understand it. Over time, this provides students with many, many examples of how they can respond to texts, the annotations often focussing on the kind of things readers and writers can notice: imagery, links, ideas, patterns etc.

Annotate High Utility Stuff

This post, from David Didau, explores the idea of ‘creative reading’, listing some high-utility things that students ought to be looking for. I can highly recommend a book referenced in that post called ‘This Thing Called Literature’ by Bennett and Royle.

Some things that we teach are more useful than others and this is also an important idea to consider when annotating. While explaining a tricky phrase in a difficult text may be crucial for understanding that specific text, understanding this recondite component may have minimal use outside of this text. Helping students to develop the habits of mind associated with interpretation, and therefore focussing annotation on more transferable things like perspective, tone or motifs may be more useful.

Annotation and the process of learning

According to Richard E Mayer, if students are to understand what they are learning, they need to successfully engage with three stages:

1. Students have to select the relevant information
2. Students have to organise the material into a coherent cognitive structure in working memory
3. Students have to integrate it with relevant prior knowledge activated from long term memory

This blog post explores this framework in more detail.

When whole class annotation is done well, it can ensure that students engage in all three stages, thereby making it more likely that they will understand what they are learning.

To help students select the relevant information, it may be helpful to focus annotation and teaching on what is required for success in a subsequent writing task

To help students organise the material into a coherent cognitive structure in working memory, it can be helpful to annotate bit by bit, stopping to ask students to discuss what is being annotated.

To help students to integrate it with relevant prior knowledge activated from long term memory, annotations will often explain abstruse concepts using familiar synonyms or by providing examples or non-examples that link what has been annotated to what students already know.

Let’s have a look at some examples:

The picture above shows an annotated non-fiction text that gives some useful context to Macbeth. Annotation no:1 explains a piece of vocabulary. While you could just annotate and move on, if you think that word is worthy of practising, you could do this:

1.Annotate it

2. Ask students to use it, perhaps through Think Pair Share or using Mini White Boards: Why were women expected to complete domestic duties? (Use domestic in your answer)

Annotation no:2 teaches a new piece of vocabulary (patriarchal) in conjunction with what they are reading. You could do something like this:

1. Annotate it
2. Use Choral Response so the whole class practice saying it. You could also explain and practice different forms of the word (patriarchy/patriarch)
3. Ask students to use this new word, again by using Think Pair Share or Mini White Boards: How do you know that Jacobean society was patriarchal (Use patriarchal in your answer)

In the picture above, the annotation explains the word and also makes a link to connected ideas, in this case ‘The Great Chain of Being’. When student learn something for the first time, their knowledge is typically inflexible and linked to the cues that existed when they first encountered it. In order to broaden their understanding, we need to explicitly show them how concepts can be applied in different places and how they link to other ideas. This type of annotation, deliberately recycling important prior knowledge, can help with this.

After making the two annotations above, the teacher can ask a whole range of questions to get students to think about what is being suggested. Here are some examples:

1. How can you argue that he is psychologically disturbed?
2. Hoe can you argue that he is not? What else could explain his hallucination?
3. Who else in the play could be psychologically disturbed and why?
4. Why is ‘the dagger’ such an effective symbol of malevolence?
5. How is a dagger different to sword and how does this add to your interpretation here?
6. What else in the play can be seen as a symbol of malevolence?

Annotation no.3 gives students three options to decide from: who or what is it that has caused his hallucination? Providing options like this can help fuel a discussion.

Annotation no.4 asks students to think about who or what lures or controls macbeth, helping them to make links across the text and notice similarities.

Annotation no.5 asks students to make links between different pieces of evidence in order to build up a more comprehensive interpretation of Macbeth’s behaviour. You could ask questions like ‘How does the dagger symbolise his ‘black and deep desires’