Factors Affecting the Comprehension of Global and Local Main Idea

Abstract

This study investigated factors that would affect a reader's understanding of the main idea at the global level and explicit and implicit main ideas at the local level. Fifty-seven first-year university students taking a college reading course took a comprehension test on an expository text. Statistical analyses revealed that text structure had a moderate effect on the reader's understanding of the global main idea; only a weak correlation existed between comprehension of the global main idea and local main ideas, particularly the explicit main idea. A nalysis of the local main idea's textual features sug-gested that identification of the explicit main idea was affected by the degree ofexplicitness, which was measured in terms of sentence structure, position in the paragraph, and the number of points in the sentence. Analysis of textual features associated with implicit main ideas indicated the complex role of example in illustrating the main idea. The study offers some practical implications for college reading curriculum and instruction as well as textbook writing.

Critical Reading Ability and its Relation to L2 Proficiency of Malaysian ESL

“…Only 34% of the students were able to state the main idea correctly while the remaining 66% were not able to do so. The former is at paragraph level and the latter, which is at text or discourse level, specifically refers to one central idea of the multiple paragraphs in the text (Wang 2009).…”

“…However, this was only tested in Text B. In order for them to generate the global main idea which involves complex comprehension (Steven 1988), the students were required to acquire a high level of inference skill (Wang 2009). The ability to identify and state the main idea in a text, either explicitly (local) or implicitly (global), is one of the most important skills required in order to decipher the meaning of a text because understanding the meaning of the main idea is synonymous with understanding the gist or central idea of a text (Afflerbach 1990).…”

“…Engagement with the text might be impaired by their poor L2 ability which may hinder their ability to explore the relationship among all the sentences that could potentially affect their comprehension (Wang 2009). Therefore, in order to understand the gist of a text, a reader must possess competent linguistic skills to generate implicit main ideas (Wang 2009). It can be seen from the responses that students from the intermediate proficiency group were able to identify more key words of the main idea than those from the low proficiency group.…”

“…It requires conscious and effortful inference skills (Wang 2009). In order for the students to generate the main idea, it is necessary for them to read between the lines and exercise higher-order cognitive processes involving higher-level inference skills (Wang 2009).…”

“…It requires conscious and effortful inference skills (Wang 2009). In order for the students to generate the main idea, it is necessary for them to read between the lines and exercise higher-order cognitive processes involving higher-level inference skills (Wang 2009). Therefore, lack of ability to infer can potentially affect students" ability to understand the gist of the text which in turn will affect their comprehension ability (Steven 1988), which seems to be the case with the students in this study.…”