SOCIAL ANNOTATION IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM
Crystal Rose-Wainstock
Kanda University of International Studies
ABSTRACTSocial annotation has the potential to support student language learning andencourage interaction using authentic online texts. Using the social annotation tool
Hypothesis, students in two academic writing courses participated in a reading andannotation assignment over the course of one semester. This study explores theinteraction students had with online texts, other students, and their instructor, as
well as student perceptions of social annotation as a tool to support language
learning, community building, and reading comprehension. Results indicate thatstudent interaction and perceptions of the value of social annotation vary quite
widely, but some perceived benefits are related to vocabulary and reading
comprehension. Students identified challenges mostly related to using thetechnology and reading authentic English texts.
INTRODUCTION
Annotation has a long history that predates current technological affordances. There have beena variety of online social annotation tools developed over the last couple of decades, and theirdevelopment has allowed users to engage with online content as they might engage with thepages of a book. Annotation, whether written in the margins of a book or online text throughthe use of an online tool, is a social process mitigated by social structures. This study explores
social annotation in the language classroom through the lens of situated learning theory (Lave& Wenger, 1991). It will also draw upon a text-as-context perspective (Kalir & Perez, 2019).
Through these perspectives, learning is a social activity that occurs within a specific context. In
the case of this study, the online texts serve as a context for collaborative learning, community
building, and understanding. Students interact with the text, other students, and their instructor
through the social annotation platform.
LITERATURE REVIEW
According to Novak et al., (2012), social annotation tools are defined by what they allow users
to do: “to make written annotations such as notes and comments,” to “highlight any part ofelectronic text using either efferent colors or various types of notations and marks,” and to“provide an online platform for social collaboration” (p. 40). Cohn (2019) adds that “social
annotation is distinct from the individual act of annotating a document because it invites readers
to comment alongside others” (p. 3). The impact of this type of annotation in an educational
context has been explored in various disciplines, and the results are often related to students
gaining a deeper understanding of a text (Chen & Chen, 2014; Hwang et al., 2007), thedevelopment of learning communities (Gao, 2013; Bateman et al., 2006; Kalir, 2019), and49

improved metacognitive and critical thinking skills (Johnson et al., 2010; Li et al., 2015). There
are also findings related to increased learner agency, motivation (Nokelainen et al., 2003) andself-reflection (Zhao et al., 2018).
Through modern tech tools, novel forms of engagement with authentic online content areavailable to language learners. While social annotation has been explored in various educational
contexts, there is little research available related to the value social annotation might bring to
the language classroom. There is even less research related to the use of social annotation in the
English classroom in the Japanese university context. The specific curriculum in which thisproject was implemented is grounded in the values of awareness, interaction, and multiliteracies(Johnson et al., 2015). Within this context, interaction facilitated through social annotation has
the potential to align with these values and reinforce the framework that students in the secondyear academic writing courses experienced in their first-year courses.
This project aims to explore the use of social annotation across two writing courses within the
English Language Institute (ELI) at Kanda University of International Studies (KUIS) as a means
for facilitating collaborative learning, community building, and understanding of authentic
English texts online.
Specific research questions for this project include:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

What kind of engagement with the text is shown by students?
What kind of engagement with the teacher and students is shown by students?
How do students perceive their learning experience with respect to collaboration?
How do students perceive their learning experience with respect to community building?
How do students perceive their learning experience with respect to their language
learning?

METHODOLOGY
ParticipantsParticipants included 41 students and one instructor across two mid-tier writing courses within
the ELI at KUIS. Students in the two courses did not necessarily know each other outside of thisproject. Students were invited to participate in the project as a regular part of their writing
courses at the beginning of the semester. The students had participated in an earlier iteration of
the intervention in the previous semester, so they were familiar with the annotation tool as wellas the overall structure of the assignment. Data was only collected as part of this project during
the fall term.
The Intervention
Participants were asked to read and annotate authentic English online articles about a variety of
topics throughout the semester. There were six online documents used during the semester
from various sources that include The New York Times, The Japan Times, Vox, Huffington Post,
and Japan Today. The instructor chose the articles based on students’ responses to a survey inthe previous semester, and based on the general clarity of the author’s opinion in the text.
50

Participants read the online texts, usually as homework, and annotated the texts using the social
annotation tool Hypothesis. Hypothesis was chosen as the annotation tool for this project
because it is open-source, allows instructors to create semi-private groups in which annotations
are only available to members of the group, rather than being public to anyone online, and the
instructor had familiarity with the tool functionality through prior experience. A course group
was created for all participants to use during the semester. Participants were encouraged toannotate directly on the online text and respond to the annotations of other students and theirteacher. Hypothesis allows annotations to be made on a layer on top of an online text. Figure 1
shows what the platform looks like on an iPad.
Fig. 1
Hypothesis layered over website on iPad

Participants received training on how to use Hypothesis to annotate online texts at the
beginning of the academic year, and they participated in a practice annotation activity in classat the beginning of the semester in which this research was conducted. In this training,participants were encouraged to use tags to organize their annotations. Suggested tags
included “vocabulary” if they were defining words or commenting on vocabulary use,
“interesting” if they were commenting on an interesting point in the content of the online text,
and “question” if they were asking questions or unsure about something in the online text.
Participants were also welcome to use other tags as they saw fit.
After reading and annotating two online texts, participants participated in small group
discussions in class in which they were asked to discuss the following prompts:

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1. What was each article about? Skim/Scan each article and the annotations. Discuss themain ideas of each one. What are the big ideas?
2. What questions do you have about article 1? What questions do you have about article2?
3. Which article was more interesting to you? Why?
During this activity, the teacher monitored discussions and helped the groups understand themain ideas of the online texts they read. Because the online texts were quite challenging formost students to read and understand on their own, this discussion activity was meant toencourage collaboration and understanding-building within the group. No one student needed
to understand all of the content on their own. Participants were encouraged to review the online
texts as well as annotations during their discussions. At the end of the discussions, participants
were asked to choose one of the two texts to use as a source in a summary response writing
assignment. The two-paragraph summary response essay was evaluated by the instructor using
a single-point rubric that focused on giving feedback about specific aspects of the students’
writing. Students also participated in peer and self-evaluation of their writing. After the firstround of reading, annotation, discussion, and writing, the writing portion of the project was
adjusted to require only a summary paragraph with an optional response paragraph in order tolighten the workload for participants.
DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Data was collected in the form of annotations made through Hypothesis on the online texts aswell as surveys administered at the end of the semester. The surveys included 4-point Likert
items that asked participants about their perceptions of reading online texts, the value ofinteracting with classmates and their teachers, and online social annotation. The survey also
included open-ended items that asked participants to comment on what was most challenging
and most useful about the social annotation reading for writing assignment as well as what they
thought about the specific social annotation tool we used for this project. The survey was inEnglish and Japanese. Responses from the open-ended items were assigned descriptive codes(Saldaña, 2015) in relation to themes that emerged.
Limitations of this study include the relatively small number of participants (41) and the existing
relationship between the participants (students) and the researcher (teacher). Participants
completed consent forms prior to data being collected, and they were reminded of the option
to deny consent at any time for any reason. They were also reminded that whether they gaveconsent for their data to be used in the study or not would not impact the grade they received in
the writing course in which the study was conducted.
Annotation Data
Forty-one participants across two writing courses annotated six online documents between
September and December 2019. There were 419 annotations made during this time. Level 0
annotations are those made directly onto a document, and there were 338 annotations at thislevel. Level 1 annotations are those in response to Level 0 annotations, and there were 63

52

annotations at this level. Level 2 annotations are those in response to Level 1 annotations, andthere were 15 at this level. Finally, Level 3 annotations are in response to Level 2 annotations,and there were three at this level.
The instructor made the most annotations (22) across the texts. The average number of total
annotations across the two classes during the semester was 8.38 per participant, and theaverage number of annotations made per text was 59. The first text had the highest number ofannotations (128), but the subsequent texts stayed relatively level ranging from 48 to 73
annotations per text.
Types of Annotations
Participants used various tags to organize their annotations. One hundred and twenty-three(29%) annotations were organized with at least one tag while 296 (71%) annotations did nothave a tag. Of the annotations with tags, they were organized as follows: 95 tags related to“vocabulary” (misspellings and abbreviations included); 26 tags related to “question”(misspellings and abbreviations included); two “info” tags; two “interesting” tags; and one“answer,” “instructions,” and “opinion” tags.
Because the majority of annotations made by participants did not include a tag, the annotations
were first analyzed according to the suggested tags (vocabulary, interesting, question). Throughthis analysis, 362 annotations (86% of all annotations) were actually related to vocabulary,mostly defining terms or clarifying definitions of terms. Of the other annotations without tags,
two annotations were asking for clarification or more information, 13 were comments related tothe content of the text, seven were about the personal experiences of participants related to the
topic of the text, 19 were expressing an opinion related to the topic of the text, three weredisplays of emotion in response to either the content of the text or other annotations, and twoannotations included responses with media (i.e., a gif file and a link to a YouTube video).
Post-Intervention Survey
Thirty-eight participants completed 4-point Likert scale survey items near the end of thesemester. The items on the survey were related to student perceptions of learning and working
with classmates and their teacher within face-to-face and online contexts. There were also items
about social annotation specifically in relation to the role it might play in facilitating
communication, collaboration, and language learning and student perceptions of Hypothesis(Appendix A).
The prompt “Working closely with teachers helps me learn. / 教師との緊密なやり取りは学習に役立つ.” had the highest average rating (3.76) while the prompts “I enjoy annotating online
articles. / オンライン記事に注釈を付けるのは楽しい.” and “Social annotation helped
students form a community of learners. / ソーシャルアノテーションは、学生が学習者コミ
ュニティを作るのに役立った.” had the lowest average ratings (2.51).
Open-Ended Survey Items

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As part of the post-intervention survey, students were asked to respond to four open-ended
questions:
1. What do you think about the Reading Practice Assignment and social annotation? / リー
ディング演習課題とソーシャルアノテーションについてどう思いますか.
2. What was most useful about social annotation? / ソーシャルアノテーションに関して最も有益だったことは何ですか.
3. What was most challenging about social annotation? / ソーシャルアノテーションに関して最も難しかったことは何ですか.
4. What do you think about the annotation tool that we used in the reading practiceassignment? (Hypothesis) / リーディング演習課題で使用したアノテーションツー
ルについてどう思いますか.(Hypothesis)
DISCUSSION
The data from the post-intervention survey seem to suggest that participants do not have afavorable perception of the role social annotation can play with regard to their ability to form acommunity of learners. In fact, some of the open-ended responses indicate that being asked tointeract with classmates online was stressful:
I don’t think this tool was useful for me. I wanted to do this by myself not with otherclassmates. It was a little stressful for me.
While some participants expressed dissatisfaction with the requirement to interact with theirclassmates, others commented on enjoying seeing what their classmates thought about the
topics in the articles:
It’s much more enjoyable than real paper. It’s interesting to see other opinions about any
topic. I really prefer the hypothesis to real paper on reading.
While students indicated that working closely with teachers and classmates helps them learn,
the survey data suggests that social annotation, as it was used in this intervention, perhaps did
not allow students to work closely with their teacher or peers in the way they value. Perhaps
students expect a different type of interaction or means of working closely with their teacher
and classmates. Social annotation did not meet their expectations.
A qualitative analysis of the open-ended responses coupled with the types of annotations
students made throughout the semester and the responses to the item about building
vocabulary through social annotation suggests that social annotation was perceived as usefulwith regard to vocabulary comprehension while reading. The average response for the survey
item “Social annotation helped me build vocabulary. / ソーシャルアノテーションは語彙を増
やすのに役立った.” was the second-highest (3.37).

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Responses to the open-ended question about what was most useful were overwhelmingly
related to vocabulary. The example responses below are related to social annotation andvocabulary:
I do not need to spend much time to look up unknown words.
It was most useful to get the meaning of words that I didn’t know. Someone wrote themeaning of word so I could understand it with reading it.
I could find one word sometimes has many meanings and I usually didn’t think it had
many meanings, so I was surprised.
Some students commented on being able to look up new words from the texts, and others
commented on how it was useful that other students had already looked up the meaning andmade annotations about the new words in the texts. It seems like students were effectively
making a collaborative glossary of new terms in the texts as they read and made annotations.
Other themes that came out in these responses were related to collaboration and being able tosee what other students think about different topics we read about:
Learning new vocabulary and knowing the classmates’ opinion. It was interesting for me
to know their opinion as there are a few opportunity to discuss with them.
When I had question about article and annotated it, other classmate answered myquestion and I can understood the question. So, it is good for us to communicate withclassmates.
When looking at the perceived challenges of using social annotation, themes that emerged werelargely related to the technical difficulties students faced while completing the assignment:
To manage to use the annotation cite.
Sometimes, a web-page for annotations did not work and I had trouble in annotating.
Sometimes the network is week and hypothesis site didn’t work well. So I couldn’t
annotate sometime.
Quite a few students also commented on how it was difficult to understand the authentic texts
due to vocabulary and complex grammar, or that they found it challenging to find things tocomment on in the texts:
Finding the words or sentences to annotate because if I annotate the article later thanother people, there will be few words or sentences to annotate so it was hard for me toannotate.

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I think it is difficult to tell my opinion clearly and deeply and specifically. The articles area little bit difficult for me to understand so, it is hard for me to tell my opinion.
While some students commented on the challenge of reading authentic texts, the survey item
about social annotation helping students understand online texts, “Social annotation helped meunderstand the online articles we read. / ソーシャルアノテーションは、授業で読んだオン
ライン記事を理解するのに役立った.” received one of the highest average ratings (3.35).
This might suggest that while the content and vocabulary of the authentic texts was difficult for
students to work through, they perhaps felt that social annotation made reading
comprehension somewhat easier than if they were reading the texts independently.
One student commented on how they found the content of the articles to be too challenging
and the use of technology unfavorable:
I don’t like social annotation because it is good for me to read on paper, I want annotate
on paper. And the assignments is little difficult for me especially last two reading article,
those two is too long or too difficult.
Some students commented on how the strategies they used through this activity could be usefulfor them in other contexts:
We can learn how to annotate the readings with some strategies. These strategies canbe helpful for another assignment like research paper.
It is very good for me because it can see others opinion. It makes my critical thinking skill
improving.
This perhaps aligns with findings related to increased awareness and self-reflection found insome of the literature. It is possible that students were able to monitor their own opinions andunderstanding as they observed the comments of their classmates. It seems like there is value
in fostering this sort of self-awareness and reflection among language learners.
Other students commented on how it was interesting to learn about what others think about
topics and what is going on around the world:
Articles that a teacher gave us was related to social issues, so they were helpful to learn
what is happening in the world.
CONCLUSION
It seems that the greatest perceived benefit of social annotation in the writing classroom isrelated to vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension. While perceived drawbacks tothis type of intervention include challenges related to using authentic English texts and therequirement to interact with classmates online, participants also had some positive perceptionsof this activity as it relates to their language learning. As with any intervention, some students
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will undoubtedly have more or less favorable perceptions, and it is very difficult to please
everyone equally. That being said, it would be useful to explore the impact social annotation
might have on vocabulary acquisition specifically considering how students naturally tended touse it in this project. It may also be worthwhile to replicate this research with more accessible
online texts. Perhaps with a lower barrier to accessing the language in the online texts, students
may be more likely to interact with the ideas and the ideas of their peers and teacher. Finally, it
might be interesting to explore the relationship between social annotation and learnerautonomy.

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APPENDIX Survey Prompts
Average Rating(4-point scale)
Workingcloselywithclassmates
helps
me
クラスメートとの緊密なやり取りは学習に役立つ。

learn.

/ 3.43

Workingcloselywithteachers
helps
教師との緊密なやり取りは学習に役立つ。

learn.

/ 3.76

articles.

/ 2.73I
enjoy
readingauthentic
実際の英文記事を読むのは楽しい。

Englishme

I enjoy reading online. / オンラインの文章を読むのは楽しい。
I
enjoy
annotating
onlineオンライン記事に注釈を付けるのは楽しい。
Socialannotation
was
usefulformyソーシャルアノテーションは学習に役立った。

articles.
learning.

2.76/ 2.51/ 2.95Social annotation helped me work closely with my classmates. / 2.56
ソーシャルアノテーションはクラスメートとの緊密なやり取りに役立った。
Social annotation helped me work closely with my teacher. / 2.75
ソーシャルアノテーションは教師との緊密なやり取りに役立った。
Social annotation helped students form a community of learners. / ソーシ 2.51
ャルアノテーションは、学生が学習者コミュニティを作るのに役立った。
Social annotation helped me understand the online articles we read. / 3.35
ソーシャルアノテーションは、授業で読んだオンライン記事を理解するのに役立った。
Socialannotation
helpedmebuild
vocabulary.
ソーシャルアノテーションは語彙を増やすのに役立った。

/ 3.37

Social annotation helped me write my summary paragraphs. / 3
ソーシャルアノテーションは要約段落を書くのに役立った。
Social annotation helped me improve my English skills.
ソーシャルアノテーションは英語のスキル向上に役立った。

/ 3.0559