The Effects of Structure Strategy Training on the Recall of Expository Prose for University Students Reading French as a Second LanguageInternational Center for Research on Language Planning, 1993 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 170 pages A study investigated whether adult anglophone readers of French could be taught to use the organizational patterns (top-level structures, or TLSs) in expository text and whether they could then use this knowledge (the structure strategy) to facilitate reading comprehension as measured quantitatively through immediate free recall. Subjects were 43 university students of high intermediate level French proficiency divided into experimental (n=21) and control (n=22) groups. The experimental group received training in the use of five TLSs: description; sequence; causation; problem solution; and comparison. Training concentrated on use of the TLSs and their corresponding signal words as strategy for promoting recall. All subjects were pre- and posttested for reading comprehension and recall. Subjects also completed rating scales to estimate text difficulty, memorability, affect, interest, background knowledge, clarity of argument, organization, recommendations, content, and discussion of content. Results indicate that: text topic was a significant factor in recall, suggesting that effects of training in structure strategy cannot be predicted across topics; more proficient readers appeared to have the structure strategy already, and those trained in it had improved recall; structure strategy is teachable; reading time was not significantly related to recall; and longer passages seemed to offer no disadvantages. (MSE) |
Contents
List of Tables | 5 |
A Justification for its | 16 |
Empirical Studies of the Effects of TLSs on First | 22 |
Copyright | |
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9 content ANCOVA Anti S Proteins anti-s-proteins Appendix appropriate signal words background knowledge causation cloze cognitive comparison content structure control group correlations covariate Descriptive Statistics Dijk discourse discussion of content effects of TLS's English experimental group expository text Fast Breeder Reactors foreign language given TLS Horowitz idea units recalled Item Number Kintsch language learning language learning strategies language reading test learner learning strategies Likert item Likert scale items main effect mean number memory metacognitive metacognitive strategy Meyer's system number of idea Nyikos post Likert present research present study pretest and posttest pretest number category pretest recall scores problem solution TLS processing Proteins for Schizophrenics reading and recall reading comprehension reading performance reading strategies recall task recalled more idea rhetorical predicates schema Second Language Acquisition second language reading significant differences strategy training structure strategy subtest Table TESOL text structure thorium TLS's and signal University of Ottawa Urquhart