Students with high reading proficiency typically achieve better results in science assessments, indicating the importance of reading proficiency. Since the process of reading is a complex interaction between properties of a text and a reader, the linguistic demands of a text might affect text comprehension. Certain linguistic features, such as complex syntactic structures and low word frequency, have been found to create higher cognitive load. However, studies investigating the influence of linguistic features on test item difficulty and students’ text comprehension in science have hitherto let to inconclusive results. The present study investigates whether the linguistic demands of expository text affect German students’ text comprehension in the domain of physics. Within an experimental study, we presented three introductory texts on different subtopics of thermodynamics and 27 single-select, multiple-choice items to 812 secondary school students (grades 7–9). Items measured students’ text comprehension (dependent variable); the linguistic demands of each text were systematically varied across three levels (independent variables) while other features of text quality and content were held constant. The results of the item response theory analysis indicated no consistent differences in item difficulty across levels of linguistic demands. Moreover, differential analyses of subgroups presented no consistent differences in solution frequencies of items related to different linguistic demands. Furthermore, while the highest linguistic demand of the texts led the students to perceive a lower comprehensibility, their text comprehension was not affected. Hence, this study provides evidence that the influence of linguistic features on text comprehension is at most low and might be overestimated in present discussions.
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the relationship between academic language registers and school success in the German-speaking education system. However, we still know very little about the actual effects that academic language has on the academic performance of students, for instance, in how far the extent to which academic language is used in subject tasks actually makes these tasks more difficult. It is therefore highly vital that any operationalization of difficulty-inducing linguistic features of tasks is made on solid theoretical and empirical grounds. The purpose of this article is thus to present the linguistic foundation used in an interdisciplinary empirical study in which 1.346 7th and 8th graders solved a set of subject-oriented tasks from Maths, Physics, German, PE and Music, while the degree of linguistic demands in the tasks was systematically varied. First, the theoretical and empirical research on linguistic difficulty from a range of research discourses is discussed. The findings are merged into a model of linguistic demands. Its operationalization is then illustrated in three linguistically varied versions of the subject-specific tasks. Finally, an outlook on preliminary results of the empirical study is given, which indicate that the categories used in the model actually do produce differences in subject-task difficulty, even though there are a number of effects that need further investigation.
This paper focuses on English yes-no interrogatives of the type Would you like/Do you want [NP]? and their elliptical variants You like/You want [NP]?, Like/Want [NP]? and [NP]?. The central question is what type of theoretical relationship can be assumed between the different forms. A theoretical discussion of different traditional approaches and their limitations is followed by the presentation of an explorative corpus search in the BNC, which can reveal interesting differences between the different stages of initial reduction, in particular regarding the semantic class of the NP head nouns: While the possible lexemes found in the full forms and intermediate reductions seem only restricted by pragmatic constraints, the highly reduced [NP]? question displays only lexemes related to the semantic class of consumption goods. Construction Grammar (CxG) is suggested as a useful approach to explain the internal relationships between the different forms, especially because it offers the option of lexically open idiomatic structures, assumes a usage-based, hierarchical network with different degrees of independence between single constructions, and allows for an integration of pragmatic features into a grammatical model.
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