Developing Comprehension with Increased Annotation

Another example of using annotating for comprehension from our reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-tale Heart."  Here is an excellent illustration of the way that targeted practice with annotating for comprehension can lead to greater text mastery - in fact, the real lesson here seems to be that sparse annotation can invite misreadings, while slow close reading annotations can help eliminate this type of errors.

This first illustrates the problems with sparse annotating. At first, the errors come from simple problems with pronoun attribution - who's "he"? and who's "I"? questions.  That's easier to deal with.  However, the problems in real comprehension come up when she starts to speed up in the middle of the passage.  It is at this point that she mistakenly determines that Poe's narrator is nice after killing the old man and that this caution is to avoid being caught.  

However, look at this later passage.  At this point, the student is really annotating for comprehension line by line.  This is the same passage I wrote about previously, where students competed to annotate more than their peers.  Look at the difference.  By stopping with every sentence - in many cases, with every major clause or phrase - the errors are diminished.  Of course, this is a couple lessons later than the first sample, so she's simply had more practice, but it's the practice in the method that seems to be helping.