Narrative Elements in Expository Texts

Sangers, Nina; Evers-Vermeul, Jacqueline; Sanders, Ted; Hoeken, Hans

doi:10.5210/dad.2021.204

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…This finding is in line with other studies, showing that many Dutch contentarea texts form a complex mixture of narrative and expository elements (Sangers et al, 2021), and often lack a clear text structure beyond the sentence level (Kooiker-den Boer et al, to appear). In a first attempt, two teachers revised the texts for their lessons, but this was a time-consuming endeavor with dissatisfying results.…”

Section: Figuresupporting

confidence: 92%

Text structure instruction in Dutch primary education

Bogaerds-Hazenberg¹

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Many primary school students in the Netherlands struggle with reading comprehension, especially when it comes to higher-order comprehension skills, such as summarizing. Scientific literature has suggested various ways to foster text comprehension, for example by providing explicit instruction about text structures (e.g., cause-effect, chronology), as this might foster the construction of a solid mental representation of the text: a coherent situation model (e.g., see Meyer & Ray, 2011). A text structure is the underlying skeleton of a text that organizes all the information. Text structure can be defined as the organization of ideas, the relationship among the ideas and the vocabulary used to convey meaning to the reader” (Pyle et al., 2017:1; see also Armbruster, 2004). What if we would teach children in primary school about text structures? Our meta-analysis showed that explicit instruction about narrative and informative text structures yields positive immediate effects on students' reading comprehension, and that effects vary across outcome measures: recall tasks (g = 0.37), summarization (g = 0.57), reading comprehension tests (g = 0.25), and text structure knowledge tests (g = 0.38) for students in the upper elementary grades. The moderator analysis revealed that content-related features such as a focus on paragraph-level structure, active construction of graphic organizers, and rule-based summarization techniques moderated the effectiveness, but these effects also varied with outcome measure. The mixed-methods study examined the state-of-affairs analysis of the current Dutch primary school reading curriculum for grades 4 and 5. The data are based on a materials analysis of reading comprehension lessons (n = 80) in eight textbooks for grades 4 and 5, supplemented with semi-structured teacher interviews (n = 29) and lesson observations (n = 11). Main findings were (1) a lack of alignment between lesson goals, theory, and assignments, (2) a strong focus on practicing strategies, (3) limited declarative knowledge about strategies and text structure, (4) little opportunities for selfregulated strategy application, and (5) strong emphasis on individual question answering. Therefore, a lesson series on text structure was developed in a design-based research in close collaboration with four teachers. Based on data from lesson artefacts, logbooks, panel interviews, and lesson observations, this study revealed several difficulties related to the design principles and their implementation in practice, and identified several areas in which teachers' pedagogical content knowledge about reading comprehension could be strenghthened. This lesson series was then tested for its effectiveness among 201 students in a switching-panels replication design with three measurement occasions. There were positive effects on writing skills for all students, but the effects on reading, summarizing, and metacognitive knowledge varied between intervention groups. This variability in effects raised questions about the exact lesson implementation. In the final study, we closely monitored three teachers and their students in another implementation of the intervention. Implementation fidelity scores varied across teachers and lesson phases, with the lowest scores for collaborative learning (51%) and the highest for explicit instruction (91%).This study generated useful insights for the professionalization of teachers and reinforcement of teaching materials for reading comprehension instruction.

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Section: Figuresupporting

confidence: 92%

Text structure instruction in Dutch primary education

Bogaerds-Hazenberg¹

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“…Viewpoint markers are typically considered a characteristic of narrative texts, because narratives, by definition, present the perspectives of characters on a series of events. However, expository texts may also contain viewpoint markers, inserted to make a text more vivid or engaging (e.g., “Let’s look at some examples together”) or to describe the experiences of people mentioned in the text (e.g., “Cavemen constantly feared for their lives”; Sangers et al, 2021).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does reading about fictional minds make us more curious about real ones?

Eekhof

Mar

2023

Lang. cogn.

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Although there is a large body of research assessing whether exposure to narratives boosts social cognition immediately afterward, not much research has investigated the underlying mechanism of this putative effect. This experiment investigates the possibility that reading a narrative increases social curiosity directly afterward, which might explain the short-term boosts in social cognition reported by some others. We developed a novel measure of state social curiosity and collected data from participants (N = 222) who were randomly assigned to read an excerpt of narrative fiction or expository nonfiction. Contrary to our expectations, we found that those who read a narrative exhibited less social curiosity afterward than those who read an expository text. This result was not moderated by trait social curiosity. An exploratory analysis uncovered that the degree to which texts present readers with social targets predicted less social curiosity. Our experiment demonstrates that reading narratives, or possibly texts with social content in general, may engage and fatigue social-cognitive abilities, causing a temporary decrease in social curiosity. Such texts might also temporarily satisfy the need for social connection, temporarily reducing social curiosity. Both accounts are in line with theories describing how narratives result in better social cognition over the long term.

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Sangers

Evers-Vermeul²,

Hoeken³

2022

DuJAL

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Voice elements are those elements of educational texts that authors use to interact with students, such as questions, evaluations, or direct address forms (“you”). These elements are intended to enhance students’ engagement and comprehension, but we know little about the extent to which they are used in present-day educational texts. Using a corpus of Dutch biology, geography, and history texts for grade 5 and grade 8 (N=1055), this study shows that voice elements are barely differentiated over grade levels. Conversely, voice elements are generally diversified over school subjects, as they are less frequent in history texts, which convey readily imaginable and relatable content, compared to biology and geography texts, which discuss less relatable content for which students need to exert more effort to connect it to their own world. This finding suggests that authors of educational texts have intuitions about the conditions under which voice elements are a desirable attribute.

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Narrative Elements in Expository Texts

Cited by 3 publications

References 25 publications

Text structure instruction in Dutch primary education

Text structure instruction in Dutch primary education

Does reading about fictional minds make us more curious about real ones?

Addressing the student

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