Comprehension of Connected Discourse: A Study into the Relationships between the Structure of Text and Information Recalled

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of reading comprehension ability and the presence of explicit or implicit causal relationships upon recall of propositional content and comprehension of interpropositional relationships. Subjects were fifth-grade children with above and below-average reading comprehension ability. Materials were three types of expository passages: explicit causal, containing causal relationships signalled by connecting words; implicit causal, without connecting words; and non-causal, without explicit or implicit causal ties. A significant effect for ability level was found for free recall of interpropositional relationships, with above-average comprehenders recalling more causal relationships when these were explicit. Below-average comprehenders recalled almost no causal relationships in either condition. The better readers were apparently at an intermediate stage in the awareness of connective relationships: beginning to respond to connectives but dependent upon explicit cues. Subjects' recalls were then examined further in order to explore the semantic variables and individual recall strategies that may be conducive to the successful recall of causal relationships.In attempting to understand the reading comprehension process, it is important to examine the way in which readers interrelate information from different sentences in order to apprehend a passage as a whole. Many researchers have approached this question by comparing groups of readers of varying ability, finding abundant evidence that readers differ in their sensitivity to the organizing structures and cross-sentence relationships of prose. For example, poor readers are less likely than good readers of the same age to render interpropositional relationships in free recall (Tierney, Bridge, & Cera, 1979) or to organize their recalls according to the structure of the original text (Taylor, 1980). Similarly, they are less able than good readers to answer questions about inferred logical connections between ideas (Weisberg, 1979).

Section: Recall Of Propositional Contentcontrasting

confidence: 54%

Section: Relative Ability To Recall Causal Relationships Given Recalcontrasting

confidence: 54%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Fifth-Graders' Recall of Propositional Content and Causal Relationships from Expository Prose

Zinar

1990

“…The wide discrepancy between the poor readers' scores on the text implicit and the other three types of questions suggests that text implicit questions may be difficult for poor readers because they must go beyond sentence boundaries and/or they must reason at a deeper level by relating two separate items of information. Marshall andGlock (1978-1979) and Bridge and Tierney (1981) found that poor readers had difficulty inferring logical relations between propositions which required crossing sentence boundaries.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Prior Knowledge on the Question Answering of Good and Poor Readers

Holmes

1983

Abstract. The purpose of this investigation was to compare the question answering of good and poor readers when their prior knowledge for the answers to questions was determined before reading to be accurate, inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. Fifty-six fifth-grade students with equivalent I.Q.'s, but varying in reading ability and extent of general prior knowledge for the passage topics, participated in the study. Subjects read an expository passage written on their approximate instructional reading level. The results indicated that poor readers did not use prior knowledge to the same extent as did good readers. This was especially true when students were learning new information. The results also suggest that poor readers have difficulty answering text implicit questions even if they possess adequate prior knowledge for passage topics.

“…Marshall andGlock (1978-1979) found that connectives such as "however" and "on the other hand" facilitated learning for junior college students but had a minimal effect on university students. Geva and Hildyard (1980) found that community college students who had speed reading drills were not affected by conjunction manipulation, whereas those students without such training handled comprehension better with explicit conjunctions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Use of Conjunctions in Expository Texts by Skilled and Less Skilled Readers

Geva

Ryan

1985

The present study was designed to shed light on whether some of the problems that average and below average readers have in comprehending expository texts stem primarily from lack of familiarity with conjunctions or a tendency to ignore these markers. On the basis of Gates-MacGinitie reading comprehension scores, 93 students in grades 5 and 7 were classified into high, medium, and low reading levels. All students read short expository texts under four conjunction manipulation conditions and answered comprehension questions. The conjunction manipulations within the texts were designed for examination of the roles of analyzed linguistic knowledge and cognitive control in comprehension. Analyses indicated that all groups benefited from the highlighting of explicit conjunctions. The comprehension of interpropositional relationships by average and below average readers was enhanced when explicit conjunctions were available, relative to an implicit condition. Furthermore, the deep processing manipulation (conjunction multiple-choice cloze) actually hindered, rather than facilitated, comprehension for all 331