Did you know that there is one skill that GCSE English students can use with all language and literature texts that will make a huge difference to their final grade?
Its … drumroll please … learning how to annotate!
Why is annotation necessary?
Now, I know it’s difficult for you to believe, but a teenager is capable of sitting through hours and hours of English classes without making any notes at all. This becomes a big issue at revision and assessment time. Inevitably, over time, students forget a good percentage of the information they have been told about a text. The reason for this is that the information never makes it into their long-term memory. Various factors prevent information being transferred from the student’s working memory to their long-term memory: students could be distracted, or they could find the information they are trying to absorb difficult to understand because it doesn’t build on knowledge they had previously. This places a strain on their working memory, and the cognitive load this creates means that less information is retained in the long term.
If a student has annotated a text in detail, when they return to the text at exam time, the notes they have made plug the gaps in their memory. They don’t have to start at square one again, trying to remember the poet’s message for example – it’s all there for them!
So, it’s well worth your teen learning how to annotate. The most successful students annotate in such a way that they are revealing layers of meaning in a text. They aren’t just ‘technique spotting’. There are steps that can be followed which encourage them to peel back the layers of a text systematically. Here’s one such example:
How to annotate a poem
- Read through the poem once. Write any questions down that pop into your head. For example: who is the speaker? Is this told in the first-, second- or third-person perspective and why? What’s the significance of the title?
- Look up any words you don’t understand. Write the definitions on the poem.
- Mark the rhyme scheme above each line. Notice whether line and stanza length is regular.
- Underline words, lines or punctuation that is repeated. What is the effect of the repetition? Write down your thoughts.
- Which words are impactful or interesting? What is their connotation? Write down your thoughts.
- Identify sound devices such as alliteration, assonance and consonance. How do these impact on the text? Write down your thoughts.
- What figurative language or imagery is used in the poem? What is its effect? Write down your thoughts.
- Identify structural devices such as caesura and enjambment. Note down how these impact on the meaning of the lines.
- What are the main messages of the poem?
- What is the mood of the poem?
The steps are deliberately kept to a minimum. You don’t want annotation to become so laborious that the student loses interest. They also increase in challenge as the student makes their way through them.
A worked example
A student shouldn’t try to attempt all these steps at once: they’ll need to re-read sections of the poem and backtrack a few times before they have a detailed annotation. I’d recommend colour-coding to ensure clarity. Here’s a copy of The Soldier by Rupert Brooke that I’ve annotated to give you an idea of the level of detail that a student should be aiming for.
Teaching annotation
Because annotation is so important, I often feedback on it in my lessons. Here’s an example of my attempts to ‘push’ the annotation of a GCSE student who tended to label a poem with the author’s method, without explaining its impact.
If you’d like your teen to learn how to drill down into the meaning of texts more effectively, and to learn important skills such as annotation, just get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
