Developing Community in Online TESOL Education through Social Annotation (Dongmei Cheng)

Despite the development of online education nowadays, how to motivate students to study the assigned content and engage in meaningful discussions remains a crucial problem that needs to be addressed. Enlightened by Wenger’s (1998) theory of communities of practice, this study explores how the use of a social annotation tool, Perusall, helps graduate students in TESOL engage in online course materials via community-building practices as well as their perceptions of the social annotation experiences.

Content analysis was done on the 120 digital annotations participants (N=5) made on assigned course materials in Perusall over a 15-week semester. Results showed that students contributed to the class community’s collective knowledge by frequently connecting to prior knowledge, reading texts, and personal teaching and learning experiences. They also supported their classmates by questioning, echoing others’ comments, and tagging others in their digital annotations. Data from an online survey and follow-up Zoom interviews showed that most students enjoyed and benefited from the social annotation experiences, despite some reported technical difficulties which could be easily overcome by targeted training.

The audience will benefit from learning the collaborative learning experiences afforded by Perusall in this study and are encouraged to experiment with social annotations in their educational contexts.