Annotation In School English A Social Semiotic Historical Account

National Society for the Study of Education, Volume 110, Issue 1, pp. 129–152
Copyright © by Teachers College, Columbia University
Annotation in School English: A Social
Semiotic Historical Account
CAREY JEWITT
JEFF BEZEMER
GUNTHER KRESS
Institute of Education, University of London
What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English
over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question,
this paper takes the practice of annotation—a defining activity of the sub-
ject English in the UK seldom researched—and uses it as a device for
uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The theoretical approach is
that of multimodal social semiotics with an historical perspective. A mul-
timodal approach looks beyond language to all forms of communication
(Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2009). The approach used in this paper allows inves-
tigation of the interactions among changes in the social environment,
policy, curriculum, technology, and student resources. We draw on illus-
trative examples from three research projects around subject English: the
Gains and Losses Project—consisting of 100 textbooks, largely from 1935
to the present day (Bezemer & Kress, 2009); case studies collected in
2000 for the Production of School English Project (Kress, Jewitt, Bourne,
Franks, Hardcastle et al., 2005); and the Evaluation of Schools
Whiteboard Expansion Project (Moss et al., 2007).
Our analysis shows that by 2009, the policy, technological, and commu-
nicational landscape of school English had changed dramatically. Now
the majority of English lessons are taught on an Internet-enabled inter-
active whiteboard (IWB) supported by scanners, visualizers, and wireless
peripherals such as slates (Moss et al., 2007). In this reconfigured land-
scape, the use of images and video is increasingly part of curriculum

130 National Society for the Study of Education
resources and of teachers’ pedagogic practice in school English, as well
as the communicational repertoire of students at school and at home.
Where previously teachers relied mainly on language, they now provide
visual starting points for their lessons and offer visual routes into curricu-
lum concepts, annotating a text by using images, for instance, to define
or anchor meaning. Added to this, the use of images in English textbooks
and digital learning resources has increased exponentially over the past
decade, accompanied by significant changes in the use of writing, layout,
typography, and color. Writing continues to have a significant role in the
English classroom, but the emphasis and characteristics of writing on-
screen appear to be changing its pedagogic and curricular function and,
with that, its form.
SCHOOL ENGLISH THROUGH A MULTIMODAL LENS
Multimodal research shows the complex ways in which images, gestures,
gaze, interaction with objects, body posture, writing, and speech interact
in the everyday classroom production of school subject knowledge
(Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2009). Building on earlier work on multimodality in
school science (Kress, Jewitt, Ogborn, & Tsatsarelis, 2001), the
Production of School English Project (Kress et al., 2005) developed a
multimodal research methodology to examine school English. The
School English Project analyzed the multimodal forms of school English
that resulted from the interaction of the stipulated curriculum policy
with the social environment in which English was actually produced. It
mapped modal and other semiotic resources used by English teachers
and students, how and when these were used, and for what purposes.
Multimodal research has shown the significance of the role of images
and their relationship to writing in the construction of knowledge in text-
books and other learning resources (e.g., Bezemer & Kress, 2009; Moss,
2003; Walsh, 2003). Among other things, it has highlighted the implica-
tions of multimodal design for how students navigate digital and print
materials, through the creation of reading paths that rely on pictures,
color and other graphical elements, and layout.
Multimodal research has drawn attention to the complex multimodal
work of becoming literate through the investigation of students’ produc-
tion of texts, models, and digital multimedia materials in the English
classroom (Bearne, 2003; Burn & Parker, 2003; Kenner, 2004; Kress,
2003; Pahl & Rowsell, 2006; Stein, 2007). Multimodal studies of literacy
practices have highlighted the importance of various aspects of English
not visible, and hence not accounted for, within a linguistic approach.
This includes the spatial organization and framing of writing on the

Annotation in School English 131
page; its directionality; the shape, size, and angle of a script (Kenner,
2004); the embodied dimensions of writing (Lancaster, 2001); the inter-
action between images, graphical marks, and writing (Pahl, 1999); and
the role of voice and the body (Franks, 2003). These and other studies
show the benefits of approaching literacy—writing and reading—as a
multimodal activity (Bearne & Wolstencroft, 2007).
We used an historical approach alongside our use of multimodal analy-
sis. In the case of the Gains and Losses project, we overtly examined a
social and semiotic change over time; in the relation between the School
English Project and the Whiteboard Expansion Project, we more implic-
itly compared changes across time. It remains an open question whether
the teachers in the classrooms we observed were aware of changes in
their everyday practice—we assumed that they would be in a reflective
mode. We employed two lenses: the lens that showed change over time
and the lens that showed what is. We did not take a view of change over
time as a continuous process of reframing of practices, nor as a linear
process, but rather as a range of practices that occur simultaneously dur-
ing various time periods. This layering of practices resulted in a complex
mix of counter-narratives and conflicting phenomena. We looked at
shifts in annotation across an historical period from 1935 to 2010, with a
focus on the first decade of the 21st century, and across the data with
respect to the use and configuration of modal resources, authorship, and
agency, practices mediated by the use of technology and the function of
the original text. Multimodality has been applied to investigate many
aspects of school English and literacy, including classroom interaction,
pedagogic practice and policy, literacy practices, the production of arti-
facts, issues of identity and culture, and, not least of all, learning. Here,
we turned that approach to the practice of annotation in the classroom.
From a multimodal social semiotic perspective, annotation is an
instance of framing (Goffman, 1974). It is a practice by which “layers of
meaning” are added to literary works, to religious texts, or to texts
putting forward theoretical positions. It creates texts, in other words, that
invite contemplative interaction and suggest its expression in some tangi-
ble form. Annotation happens according to the perspective and purposes
of the annotator, who selects, highlights, and re-frames aspects of the exist-
ing text from that perspective. The effect of that practice is to construct
a new frame (or frames) for a text; in effect, through annotation, it
becomes a different text. Annotation has usually been thought of as the
act of making written notes in the margins of a printed copy of texts. In
this paper, we argue that many means of realizing the activity and of
adding such layers of meaning are in use: Annotation is a multimodal
practice. This has been the case both in the past and in the present.

However, as we will argue, contemporary technologies and social factors
serve to reconfigure the use of images and multimodal features of texts,
and thus annotation, in new ways—that is, while texts and annotation
have always been multimodal, they are differently multimodal now.
Modes such as layout and color, newly significant and prominent, have
changed annotation as a practice in socially and pedagogically significant
ways. Increasingly now, the purpose of the annotator is to make her or his
perspective a part of what becomes, in the process of annotation, essen-
tially a new text. The layers of meaning are visibly superimposed on the
original text, making it into a new text. Annotation is done for
learners/readers by teachers, authors and graphic designers, and by
learners themselves. Thus, annotation offers multilevel framings of a text
that continue to reframe it over time. These framings are interrelated by
context and the resources they make available (and constrain) for fur-
ther reframing.
We will show this by looking at annotation in two learning environ-
ments: textbooks and classrooms. We show how in textbooks annotation
is realized through writing, images, typography, graphic devices such a
leader lines and layout, and how in classrooms annotation is also realized
in speech, gesture, and body posture.
ANNOTATION IN SCHOOL ENGLISH
The annotation of texts of all kinds is a key practice in English. Teachers
use annotation to shape their students’ responses to a text. In so far as it
elicits their students’ responses, it is also a means to bring students’ “pri-
vate thoughts into public words” (Hackman, 1987, p. 12), leaving “a trace
on the page of the sense you have been making of the text” (Northedge,
1990, p. 41). In this way, annotation is a means of reflection, through
which a reader can respond to what she or he finds significant and mean-
ingful. The marks that students make on the copy of the text, as they
work around and with it, can be seen as signalling a sense of the text as
an object (Hackman, 1987). Annotation, along with more general note-
taking, is seen as one way of making reading an active process and focus-
ing the reader’s attention on the text.
Annotation as it appears in the classroom is embedded in historical
practices of textual analysis that go beyond school English. Jackson writes:
If you ask annotators today what systems they use for marking
their books and where they learned them, they generally tell you
that their methods are private and idiosyncratic. As to having
learned them, they have no more recollection of having been

taught the arts of annotation than of how to fasten a wristwatch.
If you listen to their accounts of what they do, or if you are
allowed to examine their books, however, you find (with very,
very few exceptions) that they reproduce the common practices
of readers since the Middle Ages. These are traditional practices
culturally transmitted by the usual tacit and mysterious means—
example, prohibition, word of mouth. (Jackson, 2001, p. 5)
This paper suggests that, while certainly many of the practices of anno-
tation have persisted since the Middle Ages and later, new practices are
joining the annotation repertoire.
In the UK, the English secondary school examination and examination
procedures offer a specific definition and regulation of annotation. The
annotated examination anthology can be taken into the examination
room. The examination board stipulates what is included and excluded
from the term, “annotation,” for the purposes of examination:
Annotation means brief hand-written marginal notes, underlin-
ings, highlightings and vertical lines in the margin but not con-
tinuous prose. Additional notes, “post-it” notes or loose
inter-leaved sheets of paper and prepared answers are not per-
mitted.
An annotated text and the teaching of annotation can thus be seen as
having a direct pedagogic link between the actualization of English in the
classroom and its official (re)production via an examination. We describe
how the deployment of annotation in textbooks and in the classroom
determines what the text comes to be through notions of textual mean-
ing developed largely implicitly in that practice. That meaning, in its
turn, positions students (and teachers) toward English as a subject. Our
examples allow us to explore issues of student agency and curricular con-
trol, and we try to make the link between annotation and examination
apparent. In this way, annotation of texts becomes one of a number of
lenses through which we can view the larger question: How does English
come to be as it is in a specific classroom? Examining what students and
teachers are engaged in when annotating text enables us to ask what
sense of literature the teachers are hoping to inculcate and create. In par-
ticular, we make explicit the connection between practices and outcomes
of annotation and the work of examination, and show how this is linked
to a shift from literary texts as aesthetic objects to objects of pedagogy
and the shift of literacy from aesthetic appreciation to the practicalities
of communication.

Dymoke (2002) comments on the limiting effect the examination
anthology has had on the study of texts. She argues that students learn to
focus on annotation rather than on creative engagement, as they are anx-
ious to cover all potential examination questions, and she writes that the
focus on annotation and examination “produces kids who can produce
responses rather than kids who can write poems” (Dymoke, 2002, p. 88).
Indeed our data shows that teachers and students (year 9) can become
both fixed on and successful at attending to the tasks required in exami-
nations rather than on the meaning of the literary texts. This raises seri-
ous questions about what English is. Protherough (1986) warns, with
some alarm, that a line-by-line exegesis of a text can “degenerate into an
alternative text” (p. 39). We do not echo this way of posing the prob-
lem—annotation of any sort necessarily produces a new text—yet we
share with Dymoke the sense that practices of annotation can come to
constitute a formalistic practice engaged in for its own sake and can work
to close down possibilities of interpretation and response. Annotation
seen in that context is one practice—maybe the practice—in which the
pressure of exams is most clearly apparent.
There is much evidence of the incredible pressure of examination on
teachers, students, and schools in the UK (Elsheikh & Leney, 2002). This
pressure can lead to the teacher handing over, and students accepting,
ready-made readings of a text. While we hold a theory that values the
transformative work of any reader, we are concerned that such prepack-
aged interpretations will narrow the range of that engagement, bypass
the need for students to develop their own skills in reading, and limit the
time or the need required for repeated readings. In this scenario, the
response of individual students becomes redundant: Response to the text
is no longer the issue; rather, the point now has become “getting it right.”
ANNOTATION AND IDENTITY
This paper offers a pedagogic lens on identity. From a multimodal per-
spective, forms of representation are integrally linked with meaning,
knowledge, literacy, learning, and the dispositions of learners more gen-
erally. How phenomena, objects, or concepts are represented shapes
both what is to be learned—the curriculum—as well as how it is to be
learned—the pedagogic practices involved. Images, writing, and all other
modes at use in a school subject take on specific functions in the con-
struction of school knowledge. Images and writing offer different poten-
tials for engagement and make different demands on the learner; they
offer different potentials for learning, different pathways for learners
through texts, and consequently, different potentials in the shaping of

learner identities. Shifts in the resources of school English have affected
what needs to be signalled as meaningful in the school English class-
room. These effects are discussed throughout the examples in terms of
meaning-making opportunities, agentive possibilities, and learner
dispositions.
We now turn to exploring annotation through illustrative examples
from three case studies. The first, from the Gains and Losses project,
looked at the annotation of poems in English textbooks published
between 1930 and 2005. We describe how social and technological
change has affected annotation, and how it is configured and realized in
textbooks. Our second case study, from the School English Project,
focused on the role of annotation in the English classroom and a series
of lessons on William Trevor’s short story, “Theresa’s Wedding.” In our
third case study, the Whiteboard Expansion Project, we focused on anno-
tation in the digitally enhanced English classroom, where an IWB was
used to annotate a poem. These examples allowed us to examine annota-
tion by people (teachers, designers, authors, students) in different roles
and contexts. The interrelationships between these and their effects on
one another are not discussed in the paper.
CASE STUDY 1: ANNOTATION IN TEXTBOOKS (1930-2005)
WRITING
In English textbooks, writing is often used to frame a poem with an his-
torical account, usually in the form of a selection and highlighting of his-
torical events. This is the case in The Complete English (Mamour, 1934),
where John Milton’s L’Allegro is introduced (the text appears as shown in
Figure 1). By contrast, in Folens GCSE English (Brindle, Machin, &
Figure 1. Excerpt from Mamour, A. (1934). The Complete English. Book II. London: Macmillan. pp. 84-85.

Thomas, 2002), Denise Levertov’s poem, “What Were They Like?” is
framed among three other items—one written, two visual—with a bullet-
point list of statements, as shown in Figure 2.
The two instances of writing differ in nonformal and formal ways. In
the textbook from 1934, the framing discourses are those of aesthetics
and of (literary) history, offering the certainty of history and the sensibil-
ity of a literary aesthetic. In the textbook of 2002, the dominant discourse
is one of factuality, aligned with the genre of documentaries. Formally,
the frame for Milton’s poem is a paragraph that is itself part of a coher-
ent text. Sentences are complex. In the third sentence, for instance,
seven clauses (depending on the kind of grammar we use to analyze
the sentence) are tightly integrated. The text is tightly cohesive and
coherent.
By contrast, the seven bullet points in Folens GCSE English are not inte-
grated. They are cohesive by virtue of being part of a visually marked
block. They are not already coherent or made coherent in meaning
beyond the inherent order suggested by bullet points. There are no syn-
tactic or lexical linking devices, as there are in The Complete English, in
which the sentences are coherent with each other. Whereas the syntax
and the lexis in The Complete English establish a complexity of relations
among the clauses in its sentences, this is not the case in Folens GCSE
English. As a genre, it is an unordered list. That is, in 1934, the ordering
of meaning in the form of sentence propositions was the task of the
Figure 2. Excerpt from Brindle, K., R. Machin and P. Thomas (2002). Folens GCSE English for AQA/A.
Dunstable: Folens. p. 100.

author. It was achieved through the syntax of writing as a means of con-
structing knowledge. In 2002, the work of knowledge production was no
longer done by the author through the syntax of writing. Instead, much
of the forming of connections, or of linking, was done through the work
of annotation by the graphic designers, as well as through the work of
interpretation by learners and teachers. Annotation through a linguisti-
cally and discursively coherent text was replaced by annotation through
a list of information.
IMAGES
In English textbooks, images can select and transduct an aspect of a liter-
ary text. For instance, in New Hodder English (Hackman, Howe, & Scott,
2001) a song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, dealing with a drunken
man, is placed next to an image depicting a Fallstaffian character. The
image makes visible aspects of a world to which the writing refers but
upon which the writing itself does not elaborate. The song talks about a
drunken man, but it does not tell us what clothes he is wearing.
Sometimes an image is related not to one poem or text, but to a selection
of texts, which in turn relate to one another thematically, thus creating
cohesion. For instance, in English: An Integrated Course (Banks, 1986), a
unit called, “Falling In and Out of Love,” contains excerpts from diaries,
poems, and plays, as well as a still image from the film Blue Lagoon, depict-
ing a couple embracing.
Images can frame the literary text pedagogically and divide the work of
annotation between textbook makers and textbook users. Compare the
Shakespeare example with that of Milton in The Complete English. The
image of the Fallstaffian character in the former draws on a popular
genre of images, with a relatively recent history. In the latter, Milton’s
L’Allegro is accompanied by a reproduction of an oil painting by Mihály
Munkácsy, “The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters,”
which fills an entire page. This “academic” genre of painting has a rela-
tively long history (though the painting itself comes from 1877), and it
has a higher aesthetic standing than the Falstaffian image, at least among
a certain elite (it is on permanent display in the New York Public
Library). As well as placing the text historically and aesthetically, this use
of images suggests that knowledge of this kind about the author helps us
make sense of his or her poem. In other words, this kind of annotation is
suggestive of a particular stance toward literary texts.
Using images in Folens GCSE English allows the designers to downgrade
the status of the poem and of its author; it becomes a kind of documen-
tary. The designer of The Complete English, at a very different time, seemed

to be doing the opposite: The cultural significance of one canonical text
(Milton’s L’Allegro) is reinforced by placing it next to another canonical
text (Munkácsy’s painting, “The Blind Milton”). This use of images is
aligned with the choices made in the written introductions to the poems.
The standing of the poet is foregrounded by using constructions suggest-
ing his agency and mastery, as in, “He blends the perfection of ancient
art … with the religious turmoil of his time.” Folens GCSE English does not
contain such appraisals of Levertov.
TYPOGRAPHY
Typography is an important resource for annotation in English text-
books. Compare Longman English (Heath, 1986) and Access English
(Baker, Constant, & Kitchen, 2003). In Longman English, poem and anno-
tation are clearly separate, with the poem, the “main item” at the top half
of the page (with much space around it) and the annotation, the “tech-
nical resource,” across two columns in the lower half of the page. In Access
English (shown here in Figure 3), poem and annotation are integrated on
the one page using leader lines to connect annotations to parts of the
poem. Access English uses bolding to highlight difficult words, and these
are glossed in a separate text box. The text of the poem is placed over
a color background different from the color framing the pedagogic
materials.
Longman English presents the poem as a separate text element, with the
literary and pedagogic annotation apparatus there as a resource. Access
English presents the poem with several annotational layers of meanings
superimposed, doing semiotic work that in Longman English is left to the
reader. In Longman English, in comparison to the The Complete English, the
only annotational addition to the poem is line numbers. In Access English,
Figure 3. Excerpt from Baker, J., Constant, C., Kitchen, D. (2003). Access English 3. Oxford: Heinemann.
p. 5.

the poem’s text is fully drawn into a pedagogic annotation; the new,
resulting text has become a pedagogic rather than a literary object.
We might hypothesize that the designers of Access English envisaged
learners as unwilling or unable to engage with the poem in its pure form;
alternatively, we might assume that the designers really did see a poem as
a potential pedagogic object, as text-material for a specific pedagogic
purpose, and not immediately in terms of its poetic characteristics.
Engagement with a pedagogic object or with an aesthetic one requires
very different kinds of relations.
LAYOUT
Layout is a relatively new textbook-annotation resource. Its antecedent is
found in Longman English, where the textual annotation is set below the
text to be annotated and displayed using two columns on a single page.
All text is aligned horizontally and vertically. There is no background
color. Now it looks more like the two-page spreads in Folens GCSE English.
For example, in the response to the Vietnam War, the section from which
the Figure 2 image was taken, the two-page spread is tessellated with full-
color graphic elements overprinted on a decorative background of but-
terflies. The left-hand page contains five separate textual chunks.
Proximity and small overlaps suggest a vague kind of connection. The dif-
ferential use of modes here suggests a division of semiotic work: Images
are used for two chunks, and writing for three, potentially signifying a
functional distinction. This is reiterated through the tilting of the images,
as compared to the straight positioning of the blocks of writing—one sug-
gesting casualness, the other formality or, in other words, an implied
ontological difference between the writing and images. The layout sug-
gests an assemblage or bricolage in its bringing together of different
materials and representations. This puts the differences in writing
between The Complete English and Folens GCSE English (Figure 1 and
Figures 2, respectively) into a new perspective. The ordering of proposi-
tions is more articulated in the writing in The Complete English, and is
more articulated, equally strongly, in the layout of Folens GCSE English.
The linear layout in The Complete English is the semiotic work of an author,
while the nonlinear layout in Folens GCSE English is the semiotic work of
the graphic designer.
ANNOTATION AS A CHANGING MULTIMODAL PRACTICE
The examples discussed above show that annotation has always been
a multimodal practice. In The Complete English, Milton’s L’Allegro is

annotated using writing, but also, for instance, using a painting depicting
Milton. However, this multimodal practice looks entirely different in con-
temporary textbooks. The use of images has increased, and images have
increasingly served to frame and expand the framings of literary texts.
Typography and layout are now major resources for annotation, connect-
ing parts of the text that were previously held together by cohesive writ-
ing devices, through their arrangement on a two-page spread. This is
significant for subject English, as these resources afford the graphic
designer the means to produce kinds of cohesion and composition—for
instance, a modular instead of a linear organization—that the author
cannot achieve, and vice versa. These new forms of composition need to
be understood by the learner, and this is something that cannot be taken
for granted.
For producers of textbooks, the changes in design suggest a shift in
their social relations. Annotation is now the task of a design team and not
just that of the author of a textbook. In contemporary publishing, a pic-
ture researcher selects the images that are placed next to the poem. The
graphic designer decides on the range of graphic means to be used: the
typography of the text to be annotated, the fonts chosen for annotations
of different kinds, including the written annotations of the author, and
the layout of the page. The designer now takes responsibility for coher-
ence, which was previously the domain of the author. The changes in the
design of textbooks are indicative of shifts in agency, authority, and
responsibility across producers and users. For instance, where previously
reading paths were fixed by producers, they may now be left to the inter-
ested design of the reader/learner.
The radical shift in textbook design could be described either wrongly
in terms of dumbing-down or, as we suggest, in terms of the gains and
losses in wider social arrangements and features of the contemporary
media landscape. Lost are certain forms of written complexity, stability,
canonicity, and vertical power structures. Gained are horizontal, more
open, participatory relations in the production of knowledge, blurring
former distinctions within and across production and consumption of
writing and reading, and teaching and learning.
CASE STUDY 2: ANNOTATION IN THE CLASSROOM
In the English classroom that we discuss here, the teacher used annota-
tion for two purposes. First, she linked the process of annotation to
preparing the students for examination. Second, she saw annotation as a
device to support students in developing an understanding of a text
and to give them the ability to relate the literary text to their own life

experiences. As she commented during her interview:
Every time you teach something, you feel that it is where the
child is going that you will have to be taken, so you are teaching
annotation, finally [it] is the exam. How will that child make
sense of it? Will the child just start answering the question or will
the child be reflective, go through the steps. There is a key word
here and reading through and making notes. Because they will
come out with a better exam result [emphasis added]. We try hard to
give them a bit of exam technique, and there are all these things
we have to consider, and annotation is important because when
the child first encounters a passage and then decides to structure
a response—they have read all the questions, yet sometimes they
are not reading at the heart of the text—they are missing those
critical points, and so annotating is bringing a wealth of experi-
ence.… This is analysis; before that, it is retelling, so annotation
empowers them to be more analytical and see beyond. It is always
beyond. What we want is for them to make what they are reading match
to real life [emphasis added]—do you know what I mean? There
is a story that is purely for enjoyment: What are the author’s
intentions? And in annotating, they realize the writer is possibly
saying a or b and whether they are wrong or right; if they can give
evidence, then you have to say, “Well, that is their perception and
they can back that up.”
For this teacher, annotation was a part of the process of reading as deep
engagement with texts. Her focus was on the meaning of the texts; how-
ever, annotation, as a technical process according to the terms set out by
the exam board, was less prominent. On several occasions, she told the
students what to write, but her specific instructions occurred in the midst
of a lot of talk and reading that was not about annotation.
Throughout the lesson, the teacher and the students sat at their desks
with their pencils in hand or on the desk; the text was in front of them..
Their attention was on the text: they held it, gazed at it, and ran their fin-
gers and pencils across its pages, underlining sections, and writing on it.
They constantly returned to it; it began and ended every exchange.
Sitting at her desk, holding the text, the teacher started the lesson by
clearly framing the purpose of rereading and annotating:
We’ve read the story, and now we’re looking at the issues arising
in the story. So you need a pencil to annotate. Remember what I
said—when it is comparative writing, you need to be aware of the

various issues that arise so that you can group similarities and dif-
ferences in order to write a valid response.
Throughout the lesson, the teacher worked to establish that the story
was a general comment on marriage, rather than on that specific wed-
ding. The lesson was structured, at this point, as a series of rhythmic,
cyclical movements across sections of the text; of discussions between
teacher and students; and of acts of annotation. The teacher did not
offer a specific reading or interpret the text for them. Rather, she offered
a conceptual lens—that of marriage—through which to read the story.
She also offered them analytical tools such as symbolic inference, close
textual reading, textual evidence, implied meaning, and she invited their
responses. She instructed them on what kind of reading they should
engage in:
You need to scan now, when you’ve read something already and
you’re looking for information, you scan, you’re scanning now,
just going through quickly, looking for where things are.
In return, the students offered their opinions on the text, on the moti-
vation of characters, and on marriage. They discussed the characters’
feelings, the respectability that the characters attributed to marriage, the
assumptions that people in general make about marriage and happiness,
and so on. The teacher wove the students’ responses back to the text,
reminding them of the need to ground their response in the text. The
students were involved in the work of interpretation, discussion, annota-
tion, and finding textual evidence. The following excerpt, in which the
teacher focused on the character of Agnes, sister of the bride Theresa,
was typical:
Teacher: How does she [Agnes] feel about the marriage?
Linda: She doesn’t approve.
Teacher: Find the line that confirms …
Students, heads down, suggesting they are rereading or scanning texts.
Linda (reading): “It sickens you, a marriage like that.”
Teacher: Okay so “sickens you”—underline, “a marriage
like that.”
Students underline their texts with pencil.
Teacher: Loaded statements. Does she like Artie?
Students: No
Teacher: How does she feel about this place?

Melinda: She don’t like it.
Linda: She left didn’t she, left it.
Teacher: But how does she refer to it? “She’ll be stuck in
this …”?
Students: Dump!
Teacher: Tells you about her feelings, so you’re looking for
feelings as well, what the writer feels.
Students: She wants, does she want her sister to break out of,
she wants her to marry a more successful person
so that maybe they can have more choice in their
future and they can move out if they want to.
Teacher: Okay.
Kerry: Like I don’t think she’s happy.
Teacher: You don’t think who’s happy?
Kerry: Agnes even though she’s married.
Teacher: Yes, and we are told somewhere, where are we told
that [students start looking at story] Agnes isn’t
happy; although she is in a marriage that appears
to be successful, we’ve learned somewhere in the
story that she’s not happy.
Linda: I just think she feels stable, in some way stable.
Teacher: Okay, find it. You can’t … [taps on the copy of story
on her desk] it has to be here. You must find textual
evidence to justify your point. So where in the
story could you say this is implied if not stated
explicitly? Okay scan now, do not read in detail,
just scan please.
Paula: Page 57, paragraph 4.
Teacher: Read please.
Paula: She says [reads the story], “She’d met George Tobin
at a dance in Cork and had said to Loretta that in
six months’ time she’d be gone from the town for-
ever. Which was precisely what had happened,
except that marriage had made her less nice than
she’d been. She’d hated the town in a jolly way
once, laughing over it. Now she hardly laughed at
all.”
Linda: It’s a purpose I suppose; it was a convenient way to
get married rather than for love; it was more a
convenience to escape I suppose.
Teacher: Yes, you see you learn that now that she is married
she is not a nice person anymore … page 55.

Students all turn to page 55
Melisa: She’s turned sour, hasn’t she?
From this more general discussion, the teacher returned to the text
and the question of annotation and said, “Annotate that please, put your
square bracket; the reader learns that Agnes got married to get away
from the place that she hates.”
The text was a constant presence, and the cyclical rhythm of the lesson
served to foreground the interpretative and discursive work of the stu-
dents alongside the teacher. For her part, the teacher, while certainly tak-
ing a leading role, did not deliver ready-made interpretations of the story.
This collective way of working was reflected and embodied in the shared
resources of the teacher and students—the story as a material text and a
pencil. During this part of the lesson, the teacher made no use of the
board, nor did she offer the students dictionaries, and she worked with
her own copy of the text. Both the teacher and the students sat at their
desks throughout the lesson; they adopted the same basic body posture
and gaze, leaning on the table looking down at the story; and in their dis-
cussion, they adopted broadly the same tone of voice. Irene seemed inter-
ested in constructing a particular community of practice, a particular
collective habit of reading.
CASE STUDY 3: ANNOTATION IN THE DIGITALLY ENHANCED
CLASSROOM (2005)
In 2000, at the time of the research that produced the previous example,
there was little digital technology in the classroom. Nearly a decade on,
technological developments have had a significant effect on the
social/communicational landscape, which the majority of young people
inhabit in the UK, and on the digital pedagogic space of the secondary
school English classroom. A key factor in this is the interactive white-
boards (IWBs), which are used for teaching in over half the English
lessons in London schools (Moss et al, 2007). A technology that epito-
mizes the convergence of different artifacts and media, the IWB provides
a touch-sensitive multimodal digital hub in the classroom—a portal to
the Internet.
The use of the IWB seems to be remediating English, with increasing
emphasis on the visual and the multimodal, and in that process, the
visual aspects of writing (font, layout) are coming to the fore. Now
English lessons may start visually, for example, by introducing a poem via
an image on the IWB or using images to explore a narrative or the notion
of symbolism.

In a lesson on Macbeth, a teacher used a series of images to initiate a
discussion of the development of character and narrative in Macbeth.
She displayed images, downloaded from the Internet, on the IWB, and
asked the class to offer words or concepts that characterized the atmos-
phere of the play. That in turn led to a discussion of the mood of the play.
In another lesson, a teacher displayed a photograph from the Royal
Shakespeare Company archive, showing Banquo and Lady Macbeth on
the IWB, to explore the notion of tragedy. He asked the students to sug-
gest whom the two characters were, what they might be saying to one
another, and how they might be feeling. The students wrote their
responses on post-it notes, which the teacher collected and read aloud as
he stuck them on the IWB. These visual starting points offered relatively
open routes into the play and connected more directly with the students’
own visual experiences via genres, such as that of the “soap” (soap
opera), for example.
These starting points do not imply a rejection of writing. To the extent
that they reposition writing in the landscape of English, however, they are
indicative of what is happening in the contemporary communicational
landscape more generally. This shift matters. It affects annotation in a
number of ways, through the manner in which knowledge is represented
and produced, in which mode, and through which media. That in turn is
crucial to knowledge construction and to the shapes knowledge can
assume.
The IWB enables connections to a wide range of texts and sources. The
use of links and hyperlinks connecting to a television channel, to adver-
tising companies, to holiday websites, to YouTube, and to other video
sites, links different domains directly into the English classroom—includ-
ing texts from the everyday lives of students, commercial texts, and the
texts of the popular media culture. In addition, texts (novels, poems)
that previously had been discrete objects of study have now been made
available online. In that process, printed text of any kind is repackaged
with images, as animation, and with sound; digitally annotated, frag-
mented, and reconstituted in an entirely new text or genre; connected
via hyperlinks to author biographies and to other historically and socially
relevant knowledge.
Printed texts thereby become part of a large web of texts. This diversi-
fies the kinds of texts that enter and circulate across the English class-
room. It serves to connect English with students’ out-of-school
experiences and with the technologies with which they engage. One
effect of this is to create connections across previously distinct bound-
aries of education and other spaces, such as the commercial world, mak-
ing “third spaces” and pedagogizing the everyday. While it expands the

frame of the classroom (not always in ways that are positive), as well as
what is legitimated and not legitimated as part of the construction of cur-
ricular knowledge, it further remakes the authority of texts and unsettles
and unmakes the boundaries and forms of knowledge. This has implica-
tions for what is to be learned—what English is—as well as transforming
literacy practices, such as reading and writing, pedagogic practices, and
the subjectivity of students. In short, it changes the semiotic and the
social and cultural landscape of the English classroom, even though these
changes vary across an uneven terrain.
The IWB can be used to open up visual discursive spaces and, in doing
so, to support the reconfiguration of notions of authority. The example
below, of an English lesson on the use of images and sounds in poetry, is
from the IWB project data. The poem used in the lesson was “The
Blessing,” by Imtiaz Dharker, which was studied for an examination on
the module, Poems from Other Cultures. The teacher’s starting point for
the analysis of the poem was an illustration that accompanied the
poem—a drawing of children dancing and playing around a burst water
pipe.
The discussion of the image by teacher and students centered on the
question of what it showed and what the poem might be about. The class
brainstormed the meaning of the title of the poem, and the teacher pro-
duced a spider-diagram on the IWB to filter and organize their com-
ments. She then showed a series of photographs of objects related to the
poem, including a congregation and a seedpod, on the IWB. The stu-
dents were asked to match these images to the words and were given the
task of matching them to lines in the poem. Later in the lesson, the
teacher displayed a poem made by a student that she had “made digital”
by scanning it. This was then discussed and annotated.
The resources and experiences that the teacher drew on in this inter-
action were different than if she had started this discussion with the
poem as a written text. This difference revealed a shift in authority, a con-
nection of the poem with a variety of experiences and knowledge of the
everyday, outside the canon. For the students, it offered new ways into the
poem and new connections for English as a subject.
What matters here for English is that the canonical text—the poem
itself—is disappearing, much as in the cases presented earlier of the
English textbooks and the English classroom. The canonical English text
is becoming a visual entity, and furthermore, it is becoming fragmented,
although it could be argued that these fragments make available a wider
range of sources, including the students’ lived experiences, to be woven
into a different cloth of experience.
As this example demonstrates, the visual is no longer an adjunct, an

illustration merely of writing; rather, images and word are integrated.
Now its imagery is often the first step in accessing the poem as a linguis-
tic object. The teacher can now show and present visual imagery in lan-
guage, and more generally use visuals to provide a factual basis from
which students can gain an understanding of the meaning of a poem. A
matching exercise—image matched with word—presents the reading of
poetry as a visual and linguistic process: a multimodal process. Through
her use of the texts, the teacher reshapes the imagery of language as the
relationship of word and image in a text. The imaginative work of lan-
guage and imagery, which in the past teachers would have required stu-
dents to analyze through speech, is now mediated via the multimodal
potentials of new technologies, and it can be made material in the form
of a visual representation. In short, what English is, what is to be learned,
and how it is to be learned—the practices of text-making, writing, and
reading—are reshaped by the legitimated availability of imagery and
other modes in the English classroom. What is involved in learning and
demanded of the learner is altered.
The move to the visual provides different anchors for meaning. Both
the School English Project data and the data of the Whiteboard
Expansion Project include this same teacher. Here, she is described using
an IWB to teach a poem; in contrast, in 2000 she was using an overhead
projector (OHP) to teach a different poem. There are several marked
differences that suggest an emerging trend or shift in meaning that pro-
vides a key for thinking about subject English in the contemporary class-
room. Now the teacher uses images rather than writing as a starting point
for the discussion of poems. In 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED) figured hugely, with several copies on every set of tables. Now she
uses images rather than the OED to define the words she considers diffi-
cult for her students (e.g., congregation, cracked seedpod). The source of
authoritative knowledge has altered dramatically. The teacher displays
the poem in fragments broken up across the IWB screens—words, lines,
and the poem title—leading to the poem being spread across several
screens. This resembles the teacher’s use of the poem in the 2000 data,
where copies of the poem had been cut up into paper versions and dis-
tributed as different parts on different tables; and yet it also differs in
important ways.
In the 2000 lesson, the whole poem was displayed on an OHP trans-
parency and then slowly carved up in a steady process of interrogation.
Now the teacher works with the whole class, and the students interact
with the meaning of the poem on the IWB from the start of the lesson,
matching image and word, for example, and answering questions. This
contrasts with the teacher’s use of the poem in 2000, where a strong

boundary was drawn between reading the poem and analyzing it. This
boundary was realized by the presentation of the poem and by how class-
room work was organized. First the teacher (and the students) read the
whole poem aloud (without discussion), and then halfway through the
lesson, the students were placed into small groups and given a photocopy
of just a section of the poem to work with and interpret, each group feed-
ing back their ideas later in the lesson. In the contemporary classrooms
with IWBs, the boundaries between the work of reading and analyzing
and the work of teacher and student are remade. This relates to the pres-
sure of the examination discussed earlier in this paper. The poem is pre-
sented as a text concerned with the practicalities of communication, a
fully pedagogic object with all aesthetic features removed and with a weak
boundary between the original text and the annotated text, issues that
are discussed in the next section.
DISCUSSION
We have shown the transformative effects in four key areas of text that
has been annotated, and we will discuss each of these below. It is impor-
tant to reiterate that we see these effects as meshing and layering over
existing practices within annotation, not as a linear progression from the
old to the new.
RESOURCES FOR ANNOTATION
We can confidently say that over the period from the mid-1930s to the
present day there have been clear changes in the resources for annota-
tion. We can see these as means of representation and, in that sense, con-
sider annotation a multimodal practice. Involved, as we have shown, are
the graphic resources of images, typography, layout, and color. These
replace, with far-reaching effects, older framing devices such as punctua-
tion and intratextual organizing units, such as paragraphs and sentences.
In doing so, these resources provide new forms of cohesion, even if not
necessarily new forms of coherence. The production of coherence seems
increasingly and overtly to be the task of the reader. Throughout this
paper, we have argued that the scope and characteristics of framing are
changing. This is true of annotation in the context of the textbook and
in the context of teacher-made digital resources for the IWB. In the class-
room, the IWB is increasingly used to bring images (still and moving)
into the classroom to anchor meaning and provide starting points for
analysis.

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE ORIGINAL TEXT AND
THE ANNOTATED TEXT
There are discernible and describable changes in the interpretative layer
formed in the process of annotation, that is, in the discursive/discipli-
nary relationship between the original text and the annotated text. The
relationship of the original text to the annotated text is remade, or trans-
formed. We might say that the separation between texts has become
much more clearly marked. We have attempted to show this in the shift,
for instance, from the literary text as aesthetic object to the (formerly) lit-
erary text as pedagogic object. Without elaborating further, we note that
this shift reflects profound social changes in regard to the purposes of
education, linked to profound economic changes, and to a drastic
change in the population of schools.
WHAT HAS NOW BECOME FOREGROUNDED AS MEANINGFUL
All these changes leave a strongly marked effect in what is regarded and
foregrounded as meaningful. Among other effects, this might be charac-
terized as a shift to a more pragmatic, instrumental view of English: not
as a subject aiming to cultivate features of aesthetic (or implicit moral or
ethical) sensibility, but as a subject oriented to the practicalities of effec-
tive communication. We have indicated, through our examples, how this
has become evident in the content of what is annotated and of what is sig-
nalled as meaningful through annotation.
THE TRANSFORMED, DIFFERENTLY PEDAGOGIZED TEXT
Looking at annotation in the English classroom through the lens of
“what is,” we want to be careful to show what the annotated or trans-
formed text, the artifact of the pedagogized text as it appears, offers a
starting point—a platform—for new activities. On the other hand, there
are effects in terms of social and pedagogic categories. There is, first,
agency. What resources and capacities for making meaning are available
in the English classroom, and to whom are they made available? How do
practices of annotation relate to forms of agency? And to what extent are
these practices underpinned by covert notions of ability? There is, sec-
ond, the question of conceptions of text: What framing categories for
conceptions of text are produced in the distinctly different practices of
annotation, and what consequences do they have in the classroom? If the
different practices of annotation produce distinctly different discursive
forms of text—for instance, the pedagogic instead of the aesthetic—what

consequence does this have for children in school who are asked to
engage with the texts? What is made available to them by way of cultural
capital and what is not made available to them? What is denied to them
as a resource?
Third, there is pedagogic practice and its immediate purposes. Does
pedagogy, seen as social relations in the classroom, take as its main objec-
tive the preparation for examinations, an accumulation of skills, or some
other collection of purposes related to intellectual or moral or cultural
development? Is the notion of the formation of a social subject—to use a
concept more familiar in continental Europe—as an economic subject,
eliminating other possibilities, one that might be termed “humanistic,”
for instance? Fourth, and very much related to this, there are questions
of knowledge: what counts as knowledge? With whom does knowledge
reside? With the teacher as authority, or with members of the class, or
with the class understood as a group-in-dialogue? And, most importantly,
is knowledge seen as socially made in relation to the social requirements,
individual wishes, and socially available means; or is it seen as given,
unchangeable?
Fifth and last, there is the question of the larger pedagogic and educa-
tional purposes for which the subject English has its place. The question
is, put starkly, what is English for? The (re-)visualization both of the subject
English and of the pedagogic space of the classroom described in this
paper is indicative of the developing change in roles for writing and
images in the English classroom rather than a rejection of writing. To this
extent English can be taken as one example that is indicative of a broad
paradigm shift happening in the contemporary communicational land-
scape. It demonstrates the interconnectedness of the social and cultural
context of English, the technologies in the classroom, the production of
curriculum knowledge, and identity and subjectivity.
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CAREY JEWITT is professor of technology and learning and deputy
director of the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education,
University of London. Her research interests include the use of digital
technologies in the school, and visual and multimodal theory and
research methods. Carey’s most recent publications include The Routledge
Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (2009) and Technology, Literacy, Learning
(Routledge, 2008).
JEFF BEZEMER, PhD, is a research fellow at Imperial College London, a
visiting research associate of the Institute of Education, University of
London, and a visiting lecturer at King’s College London, University of
London. He is interested in learning, pedagogy, and discourse. Using
social-semiotic and ethnographic research methods, he studies multi-
modal representation and communication in institutional settings such
as schools and hospitals. Some of his most recent work was published in
Visual Communication, Written Communication, and English Teaching: Practice
and Critique.
GUNTHER KRESS is professor of semiotics and education at the
Institute of Education, University of London. His research interests cen-
ter on understanding how people and institutions (e.g., museums,
schools) use multimodal resources and configurations in the contempo-
rary communicational landscape. His most recent publications include
Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication
(Routledge, 2010) and the second edition of Reading Images: The Grammar
of Visual Design (Routledge, 2006) with Theo van Leeuwen.

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