Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line comprehension of narrative and expository texts. Eye-tracking results show that connectives lead to faster processing of subsequent information as well as shorter rereading times of previous text information. Connectives also trigger readers to make regressions to preceding information. These findings indicate that connectives function as immediate "processing instructions." Furthermore, all students performed better on local comprehension tasks (i.e., bridging inference questions) after reading texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. These findings apply to both text types and to all students, regardless of reading proficiency. This study highlights the importance of comprehensible texts in which implicit coherence relations are avoided.
When students read their school text, they may make a coherent mental representation of it that contains coherence relations between the text segments. The construction of such a representation is a prerequisite for learning from texts. This article focuses on the influence of connectives (therefore, furthermore) and layout (continuous placement of sentences vs. each sentence beginning a new line) on the dynamics of the reading process as well as the quality of students' mental representation. The results shed light on the cognitive reading processes of students in secondary education, which allows us to explain effects of text features on off-line comprehension measures. Our eye-tracking data emphasize the importance of connectives: Connectives speed up students' processing, especially when texts have a continuous layout. In contrast, students' processing slows when they read texts with a discontinuous layout. Our data also show a correlation between reading times and scores on bridging inference tasks: Students who read faster have higher comprehension scores. These findings indicate that explicit texts with a continuous layout place fewer processing demands on students' working memory.
This article focuses on the influence of connectives (because,so) and layout (continuous placement of sentences versus each sentence beginning on a new line) on the quality of students’ mental representations. By using multiple comprehension tasks, we found that cohesive text features have different effects on each facet of deeper text comprehension. On local comprehension tasks (i.e. bridging inference questions), all students performed better after reading history texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. On global comprehension tasks (i.e. sorting tasks), pre-vocational students performed better when coherence relations were marked, regardless of layout, while pre-un iversity students did not need connectives as long as texts were presented in a natural, continuous way. These findings indicate that connectives are an important factor in creating comprehensible texts, in particular for pre-vocational students. Finally, we conclude there is a mismatch between these findings and the current practice in designing optimal educational texts, at least in the Netherlands.
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