Scholars have described numerous accumulated purposes for reading in composition courses, but students’ reading practices remain largely invisible to instructors. Recent developments in social annotation tools allow readers to share the margins of digital texts, transforming reading from a private to a public activity. These tools make visible the reading of students, several or a whole -class at a time, and at multiple points in the term so that instructors can learn from and provide feedback on students’ reading practices. Results of a study of social annotation in first-year composition indicate that students, rather than approaching texts with a single purpose, shift among and layer reading lenses to focus on reading for ideas, rhetorical reading, critical reading, and aesthetic reading. The purposes for and ways of reading made visible in this study inform the design of reading instruction in the composition course to develop students’ reading strategies to improve their writing development.

first-year composition social annotation