Literary Education and Digital Annotation in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

This article focuses on literary reading in a digital environment and, more specifically, on designing a possible pathway for developing readers’ competence in engaging with literary texts, whether digital or analog. It discusses the first phase of implementation of the project “Assessing Reading: Support from an Annotation Tool for Metacognitive Activity” in higher education and, through Initial Teacher Education, in secondary education. The partnership between the Research Center for Informatics, Literature and Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra added to the DLNotes tool a new semantic ontology incorporating metacognitive strategies. With the dual aim of encouraging active and dialogic reading of literary texts through the recording of the metacognitive strategies activated by the reader, the development of the project, in its Portuguese version, included a theoretical dimension. This resulted both in the discussions developed in the internship reports of four second-year students of the Master’s in Teaching Portuguese and in a study focusing on the use of free annotations and semantic annotations with metacognitive strategies, carried out by higher education students. Its practical component consisted of implementation in higher education, in two second-year courses of Master’s programs in Portuguese teaching, and in four secondary school classes. To a greater or lesser extent, in both cases students were exposed, perhaps, to interpretative infinitude, while at the same time filtering the supposed dominance of unfounded opinion.