The Effects Of Student Annotation On High School Students’ English Argumentative Writing

Although teacher feedback plays an integral part in developing students’writing, seeking student perceptions of their own writing is equally important.Such perceptions help students to be independent learners and guide teacherfeedback. The present study probes into the application of student annotation inEnglish argumentative writing in high schools. By means of this technique,students annotate their drafts with comments or queries on their problem areasbefore handing in their essays to the teacher. The teacher gives directive feedback,suggestions, or comments.In this study, there are30students selected for the control group and30forthe experimental group. Before the treatment, students in the experimental groupreceived training on annotation for two weeks. The treatment lasts six weeks.Students both in the control group and in the experimental group were invited towrite three argumentative essays with similar difficulties. The control group doesnot make any annotation in their writing and the teacher gives feedback, while theexperimental group makes some annotations in their writing and the teacher givesdirective feedback, suggestions or comments based on students’ queries. It is seenfrom the analysis of the first drafts of the experimental group that students in thisgroup pay much attention to language use. It should be noticed that they also beginto raise their awareness of organization.Independent-Samples T Test is used to compare the scores of theexperimental group and the control group in the post-test. It is found that studentsin the experimental group make remarkable achievement in accuracy, but showlittle significant progress in fluency. When it comes to complexity, students makesignificant progress in syntactic complexity and syntactic variety, but littleprogress in lexical variety.From the data obtained from the questionnaire and the semi-structuredinterview conducted, it is shown that students and the teacher hold positiveattitudes toward student annotation.It is hoped that the study is able to provide pedagogical implications forEnglish argumentative writing in high schools. There are some limitations in thisstudy due to short time and small-size sample. Further research is expected in anin-depth manner among more participants.