Fostering College Students’ Reading Comprehension with Online Annotations

• Main Authors: Yu-Hsin Chiang, 蔣妤昕
• Other Authors: Hui-Chin Yeh
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/99133561458730878029

碩士 === 國立雲林科技大學 === 應用外語系碩士班 === 102 === Studies regarding online annotation suggest that incorporating with online annotation exercises in reading instruction can improve students’ reading comprehension. However, little research has addressed how students used online annotations to support their reading comprehension. Therefore, this study adopted Reciprocal Teaching (RT) as instructional framework to explore the reading processes of how students used online annotations to support their reading comprehension, and the difficulties and solutions the students had in using online annotations to attain reading comprehension. 54 non-English major college students from different departments in a technological university were recruited as participants to experience a 14-week online annotation exercise with RT instructional design. The collected data included the students’ scores from pre- and post-tests, their trace results from Google Docs, and the completed open-ended questionnaire. Pre- and post- tests were adopted to examine the effectiveness of online annotations in enhancing students’ reading comprehension. Students’ trace results from Google Docs and the open-ended questionnaire were used to analyze the processes of how students used online annotations to support their reading comprehension, and to explore the difficulties and solutions the students had in using online annotations to attain reading comprehension. Results of this study first revealed that college students enhanced their reading comprehension after using online annotations in RT. Second, the students who made more progress and less progress in reading comprehension demonstrated similar reading patterns while reading with online annotations, in terms of the predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing tasks. The major differences between the students who made more progress and less progress are identified. Those who made more progress were students who frequently reviewed and revised their previously annotated predictions, vocabulary, main ideas and summaries. Moreover, the students who made more progress were more active in viewing peers’ annotations as well as providing comments on their annotations. Third, the results of the open-ended questionnaire showed that most of the students had difficulties in the predicting and summarizing tasks, due to their insufficient vocabulary sizes that prevent them from making a prediction, and the failure to identifying important sentences and the retrieval of information that stop them from constructing a summary. Their solutions mainly asked the teacher or their peers for help through the online chat room, viewed peers’ annotations, or searched for online dictionary or resources, such as Wikipedia to solve their difficulties.