The contribution of knowledge about anaphors, organisational signals and refutations to reading comprehension

Abstract

Expository texts contain rhetorical devices that help readers to connect text ideas (within a text and with prior knowledge) and to monitor reading. Rhetorical competence addresses readers' skill in detecting, understanding and using these devices. We examined the contribution of rhetorical competence to reading comprehension on two groups of 11-to 13-year-old students: low-level (Study 1) and high-level (Study 2) reading skills. The measures of rhetorical competence assessed students' knowledge about anaphors, organisational signals and refutations. In both studies, each measure of rhetorical competence contributed significantly to reading comprehension once prior knowledge, working memory and decoding skills were controlled for. This contribution was higher in Study 2. Furthermore, whereas in Study 1, each measure of rhetorical competence had a unique contribution to reading comprehension when controlling for the other measures of rhetorical competence, in Study 2, only the knowledge about organisational signals and refutations had this unique contribution.Understanding a text involves, among other processes, (a) connecting text ideas, (b) integrating text information with prior knowledge and (c) monitoring the former two processes (Graesser,

Academic Language as a Predictor of Reading Comprehension in Monolingual Spanish‐Speaking Readers: Evidence From Chilean Early Adolescents

“…Beyond basic code‐level skills, advances have been made in revealing the role of vocabulary knowledge, comprehension monitoring, and theory of mind, yet so far only with early narrative listening comprehension (Strasser & del Río, ; Strasser, del Río, & Larraín, ; Strasser, Larraín, & Lissi, ). As discussed previously, research has suggested that during the upper elementary and middle school years, decoding skills no longer pose a major challenge to early adolescents (García et al., ; Mata et al., ; Morales et al., ; Sánchez & García, ). Given that Spanish has a fairly transparent orthography, the early and relatively easy mastery of code‐level skills is not surprising (Ziegler & Goswami, ).…”

“…However, the second broad component of the SVR equation, oral language, has remained imprecisely defined (Adlof et al., ; Compton & Pearson, ; Language and Reading Research Consortium, ; LaRusso et al., ). In Spanish, language skills have been only minimally investigated for adolescent readers (García et al., ; Mata et al., ; Morales et al., ; Sánchez et al., , ; Sánchez & García, ). The second line of evidence comes from ethnographic and functional linguistics research.…”

“…Although some reading comprehension research has been conducted with Spanish‐speaking early adolescents in Latin America (Canet Juric, Urquijo, Richard's, & Burin, ; De Mier et al., ; García et al., ; Morales et al., ; Thorne et al., ), most has focused on early word decoding. Prior research has identified code‐based skills, such as reading accuracy and word‐reading fluency, as significant predictors of early reading proficiency (Bravo‐Valdivieso & Escobar, ; Bravo Valdivieso et al., , ; Guardia, ).…”

“…Overall, the limited research available has indicated that by midadolescence, Spanish‐speaking students typically face no major difficulty in decoding the words from a text, yet they often struggle to comprehend and learn from texts (De Mier, Amado, & Benítez, ; De Mier, Borzone, & Cupani, ; García, Bustos, & Sánchez, ; Ripoll & Aguado, ). Reading comprehension continues to be a challenge for students and an urgent concern for educational researchers and practitioners in the region.…”

“…In other countries and languages, vocabulary knowledge and additional language skills have been shown to play an increasingly important role in predicting reading comprehension starting around fourth grade (Adlof, Perfetti, & Catts, ; Barr & Uccelli, ; Compton & Pearson, ; Connor, ; Geva & Farnia, ; LaRusso et al., ; Uccelli, Barr, et al., ; Uccelli & Meneses, ; Uccelli, Phillips Galloway, Barr, Meneses, & Dobbs, ). In Spanish, however, most studies have focused on decoding and fluency during the early elementary years, with minimal research on the role of language skills in predicting adolescents’ text comprehension abilities (García et al., ; Mata, Gallego, & Mieres, ; Morales, Verhoeven, & van Leeuwe, ; Sánchez & García, ; Sánchez, García, & Bustos, ; Sánchez, González, & García, ). The present study examines the contribution of academic vocabulary and additional high‐utility cross‐disciplinary academic‐language skills to reading comprehension in Chilean monolingual Spanish‐speaking adolescents (grades 4–8), controlling for grade, school factors, and word‐reading fluency.…”