Class Level: High-Intermediate

Class Type: Composition

Topic: Annotation and Summary of Academic Texts

Introduction: (5-10 minutes)

  • Greet the students. Ask Ss what topic they have been working on— pollution and environmental issues! Ask if Ss have a lot of pollution in their home countries. Then tell Ss we will play a quick game of trivia in groups to activate background knowledge on the subject. Divide the c lass into groups of 2 or 3. Each group has to assign a Mama/Papa Bear as their leader to lead discussions and choose an answer from the group. Play the trivia game.
    • The students really enjoyed this! Since the questions weren’t based on anything that the students had been learning specifically in class, they were really energetic and motivated to parse out the correct answer from the multiple choice questions. A few of the questions had to be skipped to ensure that the class moved along and gave enough time to the main activity, but overall this activity went swimmingly!

Main Activity: (30 minutes)

  • Tell Ss that today they will learn how to annotate (write on the board and explain as marking up and interacting with a text) and SUMMARIZE a text. Give each student TEXT 1 and put your copy on the overhead. Read the article out loud slowly to the students (they should be reading along) and show them how to circle/highlight/underline important information such as names, dates, and major ideas. Show students how to react to the text by adding “?”, happy faces, expressions such as “wow!”. Then ask Ss to identify the main idea(s) of each paragraph and write them in PHRASES in the margin of the text.
  • Once the text is annotated, tell Ss we will use the annotation and especially the main ideas in the margins to write a summary. In order not to plagarize, we nee to identify ‘technical’ words we are allowed to use in the reading (for example, pollution/environment/chemicals etc…). Explain that all other words will need to have a synonym. Also, show how the main ideas can be switched in order in the summary — this also helps with accidental plagarism. Show Ss how to begin an academic summary:
  • This article_________(reporting verb) the (major idea of article).
  • Main idea(s) of paragraph with important supporting detail
  • Main idea(s) of another paragraph with possibly important supporting detail
  • Main idea(s) of another paragraph with possibly important supporting detail
  • Closing sentence.
  • Write the summary with the class now. Have Ss write it onto their worksheet
    • The students were quite concentrated on following along and making notes of their own on their worksheets. I believe this went over fairly well, as every time I looked up from marking up the essay on the overhead, everyone seemed absorbed in making notes of their own. Since this was my first time with this particular set of students, my sponsor teacher aided in showing them how to write a summary by taking the key points from each paragraph in the last 5-10 minutes of class. They also handed out another essay for the students to annotate on their own for homework and give to their regular teacher. Facilitating the class with them definetly eased some of the anxieties I usually face when teaching solo, so I had really appreciated their participation despite how minimal it may have been.