Graduation Year

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Curriculum and Instruction

Major Professor

John I. Liontas, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Sanghoon Park, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Janet C. Richards, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Meghan Bratkovich, Ph.D.

Keywords

digital annotation, emotions, peer interactions, second language reading engagement, social annotation, social reading

Abstract

International students in English-medium higher-education programs read various texts from different fields in English throughout their studies. Many students find reading for academic purposes less enjoyable which, in turn, has a negative effect on their engagement and reading comprehension. Collaboration through social annotation tools may transform the process of meaning-making into a social activity. The extant literature focuses on its impact on comprehension and learners’ attitudes. To add to the literature and understand remote learners’ experiences, I explored international students’ perceptions of employing a social annotation tool on promoting their peer interactions, reading engagement, and comprehension in a hybrid EAP class. Participants were 14 international students from China, Russia, Vietnam, Panama, Kuwait, Bahrain, Spain, Kyrgyzstan, France, and Kenya. They enrolled in an EAP course, which involved making research, producing papers, and delivering presentations in various academic genres with appropriate academic language use. For five weeks, participants found web articles to complete their research for an annotated bibliography assignment in four groups of three and one group of two. They read those articles by using an annotation tool as a group. I collected participants’ background information, annotations, and their responses to an open-ended post-study survey, and ELL-RES and ELL-REI surveys. I collected five sets of weekly journal logs and conducted two sets of interviews with ten volunteering participants at the beginning and end of the task to uncover potentially differing perceptions in time. I employed reflexive thematic coding to explore the data. The use of the social annotation tool facilitated peer interactions and peer support through various interactional patterns to engage in discussions, evaluate the credibility of data, identify, paraphrase, and summarize the ideas they planned to incorporate in their writing. Most participants seemed to have cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement with the reading. They also engaged in deep reading practices and used annotations as an outline to review the texts, but they did not work on vocabulary collaboratively.

Download

Share

COinS