Exploring Students’ Online Social Annotation Types: A Content Analysis and Corpus-based Approach

Abstract

<p>Online social annotation tools have gained widespread adoption in education, offering numerous<br>benefits for collaborative learning and knowledge construction. These tools foster a community of<br>inquiry, enabling students to actively engage in reading, share insights, and participate in<br>discussions. Existing research primarily focuses on the pedagogical application of online social<br>annotation, teacher’s and students’ perceptions, the effects on students’ learning. Yet, students’<br>annotation types within the broader context of a learning community are under-explored.<br>This study addresses this research gap by analysing students’ annotation types and linguistic features<br>in the context of online social annotation. The research questions for this study include: 1) What are<br>the prevalent types of annotations made by students on Perusall? 2) What are the characteristics<br>sentence patterns associated with each type of annotation? The data were collected from 60<br>taught-postgraduate students enrolled in a TESOL program, utilizing the Perusall platform in one of<br>their core courses. A total of 6517 annotations from 21 readings were examined using content<br>analysis to identify the annotation types. Subsequently, a corpus-based analysis was performed to<br>explore the sentence patterns of each annotation type, building upon the results of the content<br>analysis.<br>The findings reveal ten distinct annotation types, including discussion initiation, direct response,<br>confirmative feedback, appreciation, challenge/critique, note-taking, reflection, knowledge<br>application, schema bridging, and resource sharing. The representative sentence patterns for each<br>annotation type are identified by performing N-gram analysis. Understanding these annotation types<br>and their linguistic features provides valuable insights into students’ styles of online social<br>annotation. This knowledge equips teachers with a deeper understanding of their students’<br>engagement and enables the provision of targeted scaffolding and pedagogical interventions. The<br>development of this coding scheme serves as a theoretical contribution advancing our understanding<br>of collaborative learning, knowledge construction, and community engagement within online<br>learning environments.</p>