The relationship between cognitive skills and reading comprehension of narrative and expository texts: A longitudinal study from Grade 1 to Grade 4

Beyond the Simple View of Reading: The Role of Executive Functions in Emergent Bilinguals’ and English Monolinguals’ Reading Comprehension

“…With EBs, a few studies have examined the roles of general cognitive predictors, such as working memory (Farnia & Geva, 2013) and nonverbal reasoning (Babayiğit & Shapiro, 2020), in addition to D and varied measures of LC, with mixed findings and not specifically addressing the shared variance between D and LC. Wu, Barquero, Pickren, Taboada Barber, and Cutting (2020) recently demonstrated that two of the three specific EF skills that we examined (cognitive flexibility and inhibition) not only predicted growth in reading comprehension in EMs from grade 1 to grade 4 but also that children with stronger EFs demonstrated faster rates of growth in reading comprehension. Within the last decade, several studies have examined the role of EF components in reading comprehension both in EMs (e.g., Christopher et al, 2012) and EBs (Kieffer et al, 2013), but few studies have examined all three core EF skills simultaneously to consider their individual contributions to reading comprehension within its two core components as framed by the SVR.…”

Text comprehension at school: Is the application of graphic organizers still important to develop it? [Comprensión de textos en la escuela: ¿Aún es importante la aplicación de organizadores gráficos para desarrollarla?]

“…The research objective was to determine the effects of the use of graphic organizers in the reading process as part of text comprehension at the school stage, which was among the most common indicators to analyze during text comprehension, which is why The students were able to: a) hierarchize and order concepts, b) link textual information, c) construct words from the use of explicit information, d) construct ideas according to the contents of the text. This may allow the existence of stimuli in the literal understanding of the text to be adduced, as has also occurred in other studies that implement this strategy (Colliot & Jamet, 2018;Cuddihy & Spyridakis, 2012;Danaei et al, 2020;Wu et al , 2020). However, it is necessary to limit that, the experience did not clarify the understanding in the sense that students with high abilities were not found to be able to deduce implicit information.…”

“…In addition to this, other research supports this perspective, including the factor of the type of text, generally, comparing the narrative and expository type. While one is more complex than the other due to its structure or propositional complexity, this is denoted by Wu et al (2020), mentioning: "These findings suggest that narrative texts place fewer lexical demands on children than expository texts do. Therefore, children's vocabulary level is an important factor to consider when exploring the possible differences between narrative and expository text comprehension…" (p. 2).…”

“…Although it can be accepted that both types of text generate some complexities associated with cognitive overload, text manipulation and analysis, but it is still important to understand written information, in what is found in and within the text. Some studies propose other processes such as those that allow the meaning of the text to be collected more effectively, to generate more real concepts with respect to the same text that students read, to generate better constructed meanings or that are clearer for understanding (Holguin & Rodríguez , 2017;Ponce & Holguin, 2014;Wu et al, 2020), to establish a greater burden of information recall through interpretation when accompanying cognitive skills are used (Medina & Nagamine, 2019;Munayco, 2017;Niño, 2011;Wu et al, 2020), as well as, to represent the relationship of the information or literal meanings of the text through colorful graphic diagrams (Buzán, 1996;Campos, 2005;Ontoria, 2005). Analyzing this problem, focused on the analysis of the text, the text organizers improve the understanding of the text, its memory, in addition to what is provided by Colliot & Jamet (2018), who argue that the memory of information, hierarchization and Schematic production is crucial to understanding texts: "Results revealed that studying with graphics or outlines, rather than with the text on its own, led to better recall of the represented facts.…”

Introduction to the Special Issue: Mechanisms of Variation in Reading Comprehension: Processes and Products

“…A similar conclusion was suggested in Currie et al, (2021) to explain the fact that text inconsistencies were more difficult to notice in expository texts, even for monolingual readers. Expository texts place greater demands on executive function skills because of their greater incidence of complex syntactic forms (Wu, Barquero, Pickren, Barber, & Cutting, 2020). Thus, the contrast of narrative vs. expository texts offered in this paper is important for understanding differences in oral vs written comprehension processes.…”