Beyond the Yellow Highlighter: Teaching Annotation Skills to Improve Reading Comprehension.

sity bookstore when I was a college student was the yellow highlighter. I know because I stocked and sold them while working my way through college. I also purchased them and made the pages of my books very colorful. Annotating, or marking the text to identify important information and record the reader’s ideas, was a skill I had observed other learners using but never practiced myself because I did not own the books I read in high school. The yellow marks in my college textbooks, which left little of the page in its original color, did not help me to learn very much. Unfortunately, I was nearly a junior in college before I knew how to highlight key ideas and write marginal notes that helped me make connections, pose questions, and interpret ideas. I still did not know how to teach this skill effectively until two years ago, when I worked with two teachers—one who had the language for teaching annotating and one who was making the process of marking a text visible to his students. Janell Cleland and Tom O’Donnell co-taught a reading class and, by bringing Janell’s language and Tom’s methodology together, their students and mine are no longer left to learn this process by chance.