Question 1
Pages 263-265 of The Academic Writer provide support for teaching students to annotate a text. Discuss the following questions and write a group response in a post to this blog.
- Do the questions (265) reflect your own processes when annotating? How are the similar or different?
- Are the questions worthwhile (in your individual and/or collective opinion)?
- MOST IMPORTANTLY!: How would you use these questions in your class to promote critical reading skills?
Question 2
Summarizing texts is one of the most important skills student must have to be able to "write from sources" rather than "write from sentences" (Rebecca Moore Howard). Discuss the following questions and write a group response in as a post to this blog.
- Do these Guidelines (267) make sense to your group? Why or why not?
- Do you have other guidelines you regularly use for summary writing? Would you share those if you do?
- AGAIN, VERY IMPORTANT!: How do you teach summary in your 101 classes and how might the Guidelines in The Academic Writer help your students write better summaries? In other words, how would you use these Guidelines to promote better summary writing?
When we annotate, we:
ReplyDelete• Clarify words or passages that are confusing (write “translation” near the passage so that it’s easier to return to
• Reverse outline – try to create an outline of the text in the margins
• Annotate to make returning to the article easier – not necessarily to form a response
Are the questions worthwhile?:
• Yes, the questions are worthwhile as a heuristic device, rather than as a strict framework
How would we use these questions?
• You don’t necessarily have to use the questions to create annotations in the text – we would also incorporate these questions into the creation of annotated bibliographies
• Annotating as summary helps students to understand the text
Do the guidelines on p. 267 make sense?:
• We felt like these questions mirrored the way that we approach annotating a text while reading
• We think these questions would need to be supplemented with additional guidance
Other guidelines for summary
• Students should put the text aside and then attempt to write a summary based on their memory of the reading
• While we don’t discourage quoting or paraphrasing, we want students to focus on the main points of the text first
Using guidelines in 101:
• These guidelines are not unique enough to help with the typical problems that students encounter when writing a summary. Actually doing what the guidelines suggest is easier said than done – and the instructor will have to rely on their own negotiation of how they taught summary in the first place. So, these guidelines aren’t wrong, but they aren’t anything new.
Stephen Skalicky, Dale Grauman, Matt Halm, Jill Bohle
Steve was our scribe. I would like to formally distance myself from the aesthetic of his textual design here.
DeleteDepending on the reason for summarizing, we thought that this guide on 268 may help as a discrete comprehension exercise. However, in the context of summarizing and responding to text in a writing assignment, this leaves out the critical thinking of what the writer may be summarizing toward.
ReplyDeleteThe annotation example and section seems very useful in helping students to engage with and respond to the text. Annotation and summary used together might help to facilitate the directive summary and response we want students to perform in their writing, particularly questions 4 and 8.
Mary Ellen Pastor, Jen Kiehne, and Leslie Jo Sena
Sorry to post here as a reply, but it is taking me way too long to figure out how to comment on the original post.
DeleteThoughts on annotation:
• There are lots of different types of annotation that you could do: just summary, summary and response.
• We don’t consciously follow the guidelines. We don’t follow all of the guidelines presented in the book.
• One of us has never done annotation before grad school and is just starting to learn how to do it and how it is useful.
• Side note: it is really important to explain to students why we do annotation.
Thoughts on summary:
• Sometimes it’s good to have guidelines with a clear structure for using as a starting point, but these guidelines won’t work for every section, even in the same class at WSU. (One teacher--not in our group--starts her unit on summary with having the students write a summary. Then she reads through these and THEN decides how she will go about teaching summary. This is perhaps better than a one-size-fits-all approach.)
• Summarizing is really hard—even for us graduate students!
• We all don’t agree with the guidelines that summary should not use paraphrase or quoting. But where is the line between summarizing, quoting, and paraphrasing? This awareness of when it is appropriate to use each is difficult to teach.
• We do follow some of these guidelines (asking students to zone in on the title and thesis)—because having concrete steps gives students a framework to approach summary. We do a lot of in-class practice before we ask them to do summary on their own.
• These are Daniela’s ideas for summary activities:
o Steps: 1. Look at title and thesis. 2. Identify main points. 3. Practice paraphrasing.
o Divide page in two columns: one with actual text, one with my own summary of each paragraph. Then ask students to consider why I made these choices, or if they would make different choices.
o Powerpoint presentation. Start with one small informative paragraph, and have students work sentence by sentence or chunk by chunk to identify main points and putting the authors ideas into their own words. After students have their own summary, show the summary that you have prepared, discussing differences and similarities.
• How would you use these Guidelines to promote better summary writing?
• Pick an article that is conductive to using these steps and have them work through the questions in class.
• How many days would you/do you spend on summary?
1. 2-3 weeks
2. 1 week
3. One week and a half of activities focused on summary, but return to it in subsequent units/assignments.
- Jen O'Brien, Daniela Miranda, and Elizabeth Edwards
Our group (Heather, Kate, Stacy, and Laura) talked mostly about using annotations:
ReplyDelete1) We do use 1-3 “Questions for Annotation” in reading for our own. It depends on what the level of reading is. For “graduate level” texts, we annotate for questions. We also use annotations to make connections between parts of the text and outside “texts” (films, etc…)
3) When we introduce annotating to students, we sometimes use other methods than the list of questions on 265. We talk about reading actively “with the grain” and “against the grain.” We also bring in for students early examples of annotation attempts we’ve made and “revised” attempts that have a “key” like brackets and stars to distinguish main ideas. We also model how to ask those questions before introducing the page. We also want to encourage students to look up vocabulary they don’t know—not just circle unknown words. We have students do it in class and we also have them read at home with a computer or smart device or way old fashion dictionary nearby. Alternately, we understand reading comprehension skills as a part of learning to read in a genre and we struggle with ways to help students understand that in any new genre they need to re-adapt to new vocabulary each time they read it.
Summary: We don’t necessarily use the questions on 267 for summarizing. Mostly we have students attempt to summarize parts of the text. We model our own process and struggles for the assigned reading. We use “Filtering Reality” on pg. 261. Students have something to say about the topic and can summarize part or all of it fairly easily.