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ROLE Literacy and Science Achievement Project
2005-2006
In the ROLE Literacy and Science Project (ROLE: ALSP) our goal is to help students improve their reading and science achievement in 9th and 10th grade science. We do this through providing instructional, material, and technological support for students’ interaction with texts. We use an instructional strategy, annotation of science text, as a tool to help make text structure more visible to students. We believe that making text structure more visible helps students read more deeply and with better understanding about what the author meant to convey in the text (content) and how the author chose to convey (rhetorically) the information.
Structurally, our annotation approach asks students to identify the main ideas, evidence/supporting ideas, major and other points of transition, definitions provided in text, major conclusions drawn, inferences, and difficult sentence construction.
In our annotation approach we also encourage identification of unit vocabulary and other difficult vocabulary (e.g., everyday words that have uncommon usages in science or the same words used in different ways in the same text). We find that this support for vocabulary identification is helpful for students. Poor and moderately skilled readers often skip words they don’t recognize or know the meaning of, in text, and fail to grasp key information in the text.
There are 3 primary steps in text annotation. First, the reader should skim the text. Skimming allows the reader to gain an overall view of the text’s length, presence/absence of heading and subheadings, tables, etc. (As the teacher, you may want to place the article on an overhead projector and guide the skimming process—pointing out the overall features of the text.)
Next, the reader should begin the annotation process. We recommend the reader focus on one structural component at a time (e.g., transition words/phrases or subheadings) rather than annotating all structural components paragraph by paragraph.
Finally, the reader should review the annotation with a peer or the annotation can be reviewed with the class.
Copyright 2005, University of Illinois at Chicago, Adolescent Literacy and Support Achievement Project
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