Influence of Annotation on Reading Performance in Higher Education

Abstract

One of the objectives of training professionals in Language Studies is to enhance their ability to read and write proficiently, so that they can develop appropriate strategies for teaching reading and writing. Consequently, a crucial skill to be developed when working with argumentative texts, our focus here, is the identification of the thesis and arguments. In this context, this work aims to evaluate such skill in undergraduate students in Language Studies, comparing their reading/writing performances in two modalities: handwritten and digital. Through an experimental methodology (Paiva, 2019), our main question is to verify whether to take notes play a significant role in the reading process. To this end, and based on the experiment conducted, we analyzed 134 discursive answers collected from a research instrument where the subjects, students in the course, read an opinion article (in print or digital format) and then wrote what they understood to be the central thesis of the text. The analysis revealed a significant difficulty for the subjects to identify the thesis related to a specific argument in both modalities. We also observed that the practice of taking notes increased the performance of these students. Therefore, the facts lead us to conclude that taking notes is a good strategy to read in both digital and print modalities.