AVReading Newsletter January-- Marking Up a Text
Perhaps one of my most frequent reading lessons is teaching students to annotate -- or mark-up-- a text. No matter the format (book, article, digital text, pdf), I will spend time before the assignment reviewing how they will need to mark-up the text. It’s a lesson that is quite useful for a number of reasons. First, it is important to get students into the habit of marking up all of their texts. The expectations are that the reading is just the first step in a larger lesson. In other words, the assignment is not the reading itself, it’s the activity or project or assessment that usually follows that reading. And to complete that activity or project or assessment, they will need to be able to refer back to important details, passages, and ideas from the text. Marking up that text then is a means to that larger end. Second, the mark-ups themselves offer a considerable amount of insight into what the student unde...