Master of Arts

Reading comprehension is such an important literacy skill that there is a need to constantly seek ways to help students become more strategic readers, to be able to connect with the text that they are reading and construct personal meaning from the text. This is especially important to students in the middle-performing (MP) and low-performing (LP) classes at the Primary 5 level from which the participants of the proposed study are drawn. One way to make connections with the text while reading is by using annotations.

The proposed study focuses on an instructional intervention to improve reading comprehension, especially through deriving meaning from text and linking meaning through constructive processes. In the proposed study, students are explicitly taught how to make effective annotations that include purposeful text markings, either by highlighting or by underlining, which are supported by meaningful notes written along the margin of the text (Harvey and Goudvis, 2007). Students are taught to use these annotations to connect the text they are reading with their personal background knowledge and experiences, and with what they may have read before, either elsewhere in the book that they are reading or elsewhere in a previously read book, article, and so on (Zimmermann and Keene, 2007). The aim of the proposed study is to examine if making annotations can help students work through their thinking and make the necessary connections with the text, thereby fostering reading comprehension. The proposed study seeks to answer the following research questions:

1. To what extent does students’ ability to make connections improve when they are explicitly taught how to annotate while reading?
2. To what extent do students in the middle-performing group and the low-performing group benefit from making annotations?
3. How does the explicit teaching of annotation help students make connections while reading?

The study takes on a mixed methods approach, with pretest and posttest data supported with findings from document study of students’ work done in worksheets and tests, and interviews with selected students. The pretest and posttest scores were analysed to determine the extent to which students’ ability to make connections had improved when they were explicitly taught how to annotate while reading. The focus of the document study and interviews is to examine and investigate how students used annotations to make connections while reading in order to foster comprehension. A comparison of mean increase by all the students in the study show that, taken as a whole, the students in the intervention group achieved a greater increase in scores for the three inferential questions in the pretest-posttest, as compared to the students in the comparison group, and that this increase in scores is statistically significant. Preliminary findings also suggest that the intervention had benefitted the LP students more than the MP students. Moreover, findings from document study and interviews with selected students support the quantitative data from pretest and posttest, and showed an improvement in students’ ability to make better and more complex connections while reading.