Awareness of Text Structure in Recognition and Production of Expository Discourse

Hiebert, Elfrieda H.; Englert, Carol Sue; Brennan, Sharon

doi:10.1080/10862968309547497

Cited by 39 publications

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References 5 publications

(8 reference statements)

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“…Other relevant text-structure knowledge includes knowledge of the organizational patterns of the prose itself, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph. According to research on learning from text, (a) knowledge of text structure is highly related to comprehension and learning (Englert & Hiebert, 1984;Englert, Stewart, & Hiebert, 1988;Hare et al, 1989;Hiebert et al, 1983;Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980;Taylor, 1980;Taylor & Samuels, 1983); and (b) knowledge of text structure is acquired developmentally (Brown & Smiley, 1977;Englert & Hiebert, 1984;Englert & Thomas, 1987;Winograd & Bridge, 1986; Wong & Wilson, 1984). These conclusions suggest that the efficiency and effectiveness of the search process in elementary children may be hampered by their relative unfamiliarity with informational text, including its characteristic structures.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are doubtless many reasons why this is the case, but we will mention only two reasons here. First, informational text is comprised of a number of organizational patterns or discourse structures (e.g., description, comparison/contrast, temporal sequence, explanation, problem-solution) that are not as familiar to elementary children as the structure of narrative text (e.g., Englert & Hiebert, 1984;Hiebert, Englert, & Brennan, 1983;Taylor, 1980;Taylor & Samuels, 1983). If children are not familiar with the structure of informational text, they are unlikely to be able to locate information efficiently and effectively.…”

Section: Other Factors Related To the Search Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Locating Information in Text: A Focus on Children in the Elementary Grades

Armbruster

Armstrong

1993

Contemporary Educational Psychology

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A review was conducted of the research related to the ability of elementary school children to carry out search tasks with informational text. The review was organized within a framework of components of the search process: Goal Formation, Text Selection, Information Extraction and Integration, and Evaluation. The research reviewed suggests that older and more proficient readers are better able than younger and less proficient readers to execute search tasks successfully and spontaneously. Other factors, such as the considerateness of text and the reader's prior knowledge of text structure and topic, were also shown to affect children's ability to search informational text. Implications for instruction are discussed.Locating Information in Text -2 LOCATING INFORMATION IN TEXT: A FOCUS ON CHILDREN IN THE ELEMENTARY GRADESIn school, children search text for answers to questions, pursue evidence in support of a point, and seek information on topics of interest. Recognition of the importance of locating information is evident in the fact that it is assessed on standardized tests and taught in commercially published programs, such as basal programs in reading and social studies.In this report we review research related to the ability of elementary school children to search text to locate information. We conclude with some reflections on the educational implications of this research. What is Involved in Locating Information?Locating information is a type of strategic reading (Guthrie & Mosenthal, 1987). Strategic readers have the following characteristics: (a) They have a purpose or goal for reading, which defines the reading task; (b) They analyze the task and all the factors that affect it; (c) From an analysis of the task, the text, and their own cognitive and affective resources, strategic readers carefully select tactics appropriate for achieving their goal; (d) They monitor their comprehension, thinking, and learning; and (e) They are flexible, changing their strategy as necessary to achieve their goal (Wade & Armbruster, in press).Guthrie and his colleagues have addressed the more specific question of what is involved in the subset of strategic reading of interest here--locating information. Guthrie and Mosenthal (1987) propose a model of the subprocesses of information location. The components of their model are:1. formulate a goal, 2. inspect appropriate categories of information, 3. sequence the inspection, 4. extract details from one or more categories, and 5. recycle to obtain a solution.Dreher (1992) presents a variation of this model, with the following five components:1. goal formation--formulating a goal or plan of action, 2. category selection--selecting appropriate text sections or categories (e.g., table of contents) for inspection, 3. information extraction--extracting the relevant information from the selected categories, 4. integration--integrating the extracted information with prior knowledge of the topic, and 5. recycling--repeating the preceding processes until the search task is comp...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Other Factors Related To the Search Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Locating Information in Text: A Focus on Children in the Elementary Grades

Armbruster

Armstrong

1993

Contemporary Educational Psychology

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“…Text structure knowledge is closely related to reading comprehension and writing performance (Hiebert et al, 1983). On the one hand, the structure of a text helps readers to easily find what they are looking for; on the other hand, the text structure helps writers to coordinate ideas and intention.…”

Section: Facilitating the Writing Process Through Cognitive Writing Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former supports the writer in relating main propositions via a genre-based structure that provides some kind of schema to fill in. The latter supports the writer in relating main propositions by selecting and organizing information units.Text structure knowledge is closely related to reading comprehension and writing performance (Hiebert et al, 1983). On the one hand, the structure of a text helps readers to easily find what they are looking for; on the other hand, the text structure helps writers to coordinate ideas and intention.…”

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confidence: 99%

Improving Undergraduates’ and Postgraduates’ Academic Writing Skills with Strategy Training and Feedback

Wischgoll

2017

Front. Educ.

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To improve text quality in higher education, training writing strategies (i.e., text structure application, summarization, or language use) and provision of feedback for revising (i.e., informative tutoring feedback or try-again feedback) were tested in combination. The aim was to establish whether first, strategy training affects academic writing skills that promote coherence, second, whether undergraduates and postgraduates benefit differently from feedback for revising, and third, whether training text structure application strategy in combination with informative tutoring feedback was most effective for undergraduates' text quality. Undergraduate and postgraduate students (N = 212) participated in the 2-h experimental intervention study in a computer-based learning environment. Participants were divided into three groups and supported by a writing strategy training intervention (i.e., text structure knowledge application, summarization, or language use), which was modeled by a peer student in a learning journal. Afterward participants wrote an abstract of an empirical article. Half of each group received in a computer-based learning environment twice either try-again feedback or informative tutoring feedback while revising their drafts. Writing skills and text quality were assessed by items and ratings. Analyses of covariance revealed that, first, text structure knowledge application strategy affected academic writing skills positively; second, feedback related to writing experience resulted in higher text quality: undergraduates benefited from informative tutoring feedback, postgraduates from try-again feedback; and third, the combination of writing strategy and feedback was not significantly related to improved text quality.Keywords: coherence, feedback, higher education, text quality, writing strategies inTrODUcTiOn The writing performance of freshmen and even graduate students reveals a gap between writing skills learned at school and writing skills required at the college or university level (Kellogg and Whiteford, 2009): writers at school are able to transform their knowledge into a text that they can understand and use for their own benefit. Academic writing requires in addition to that presuming the readers' understanding of the text written so far to establish a highly coherent text (Kellogg, 2008).Several studies have shown that to improve writing, it is beneficial to train writing strategies and to support the writing process through feedback (Graham, 2006;Nelson and Schunn, 2009;Donker et al., 2014). This is also true for higher education (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006;MacArthur , 2015;Wischgoll, 2016). Writing strategies can help learners to control and modify their efforts to master the writing task (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987). Feedback for improving writing provides information about the adequacy of the writing product (Graham and Perin, 2007). On the other hand, feedback that interrupts the writing process might be inhibitive (Corno and Snow, 1986). Feedback that is administered adapti...

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“…Researchers can exert such experimental control by providing writers with partial text. For example, Hiebert, Englert, and Brennan (1983) provided writers with an opening sentence that specified the topic and signaled a particular text structure (such as comparison-contrast) for which the writers were to compose the remainder of the paragraph. Similarily, Kemper (1982) used a "gap-filling" paradigm in which students read short narratives and were told to compose new sentences wherever they felt some events might be missing.…”

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confidence: 99%

The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

et al. 2000

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All writers produce text content and ideally connect it together according to discourse conventions. Weinvestigate whether a particularly strong discourse convention, the need for causal coherence in narratives, can predict the kind of text writers will produce. Causality has been found to be a significant discourse factor in reading comprehension and hence can be expected to determine also what writers produce during composition. In Experiment 1, writers composed short continuations at various points throughout a simple narrative, whereas in Experiment 2, writers composed continuations to complete several narratives. The results indicate that causality indeed plays a major role in composition. Writers tend to produce new text in such a way that it is causally connected to the prior text. Furthermore, writers favored causal relations of necessity or of necessity and sufficiency while largely avoiding relations of sufficiency alone, which suggests a general discourse constraint to be maximally informative (e.g., Grice, 1975).All writers must produce ideas (Collins & Gentner, 1980;Torrance, Thomas, & Robinson, 1996) and ideally, writers also provide coherence by connecting those ideas in some genre-appropriate way (McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982). Scardama1ia (1985, 1987) captured these observations by describing two sets of knowledge on which writers draw during writing: (1) Writers use topic knowledge (including the evolving text) to produce relevant ideas, and (2) writers use discourse knowledge to structure how the ideas are arranged and to determine which topic ideas are relevant (McCutchen, 1986; MeCutchen & Perfetti, 1982).Topic and discourse knowledge play important, but different, roles in determining which ideas are produced and how they are ultimately connected. For example, if a writer knows more about baseball and less about soccer (varying topic knowledge), the writer has different limits in what he/she is able to say when composing a description of each game. Regardless of topic knowledge, however, the writer's discourse knowledge should cue him/her to attempt to say something in each of several categories for the genre of "game description," such as mentioning "the object of the game," "the rules," "the number of players," and so on (e.g., Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1982 1986). Coe (1987) has referred to conventions for the form of the discourse as heuristics that help writers search for particular kinds of information to produce for text. A very explicit example ofdiscourse conventions exists in the Publication Manual ofthe American Psychological Association (1994), which helps writers by specifying what kinds of ideas are considered relevant for a research report and how they are to be arranged. Thus, available topic information limits specific content, whereas discourse knowledge influences what kinds of topic information are produced and how they are connected. If this view is correct, it should be possible, given a genre with well-known discourse conventions, to make predictions about the kinds of ...

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Awareness of Text Structure in Recognition and Production of Expository Discourse

Cited by 39 publications

References 5 publications

Locating Information in Text: A Focus on Children in the Elementary Grades

Locating Information in Text: A Focus on Children in the Elementary Grades

Improving Undergraduates’ and Postgraduates’ Academic Writing Skills with Strategy Training and Feedback

The role of causal discourse structure in narrative writing

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