It's been the cold hard middle of the second semester - beware the Ides of March and all that. But a good thought yesterday in class . . .
Most of my students decode fairly well. They're non-readers: for the most part, students who cannot make meaning out of words strung together even if they know a large number of the words. It reminds me of my early days of high school Spanish. I had a bit of vocabulary but it took too much processing power to put it all together.
Yesterday, I listened to a student read and heard slow decoding though. He could do it, but at a low level. How is this student supposed to make meaning while working so hard to process individual words? The answer is simple. He has to take some strain off the processor to free up room for individual programs to run. He can annotate just a phrase of a sentence, then move on. He doesn't have to hold nearly as much meaning in his head while decoding the next set of words.
In math, this is a no-brainer, right? We make students write down the steps of the problem so we can check their progress, but also so that they don't have to hold multiple computations in their heads at the same time.
Annotation isn't for writing in a case like this. Annotation is a process related to reading - the actual comprehension of a text.
