The role of knowledge of connectives in comprehension of a German narrative text

Abstract

Background Connectives, such as because or although, explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students with high metacognitive knowledge. The present study assessed the applicability of these findings to German narrative texts. Methods Structural equation modelling was performed on a study of 456 ninth graders. Tasks mainly consisted of standardised tests. Results Controlling for general vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency and knowledge of reading strategies, knowledge of connectives significantly and positively related to text comprehension for monolingual students, whereas there was no significant effect for bilinguals. Knowledge of connectives did not interact with knowledge of reading strategies. Conclusions It may be beneficial to teach deep knowledge of connectives, in combination with further language knowledge essential to understand individual elements of a text, for example, vocabulary.

Comprehension of Connectives: Development Across Primary School Age and Influencing Factors

“…Drawing on the theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence, we expect students' comprehension of connectives to increase from Grade 2 to Grade 4. In line with the assumptions of Cummins (1981), previous results on the comprehension of connectives in monolingual and language minority students (e.g., Droop and Verhoeven, 2003;Kohnen and Retelsdorf, 2019), and studies on the development of other facets of academic language in primary school age (e.g., Volodina et al, 2020; Stanat, in press), we expect students from higher-SES families to outperform students from lower-SES families at least in the initial level and potentially also in growth rate of the comprehension of connectives. Comparatively higher growth rates are suggested by the fact that restricted grammatical skills (e.g., Huttenlocher et al, 2010;Weinert and Ebert, 2013) and less stimulation of academic language at home (Leseman et al, 2007;Scheele et al, 2010) might lead to a Matthew effect [i.e., children from higher-SES families who start out with advanced language skills and more accelerated connective comprehension and who experience higher literacy stimulation and promotion of academic language at home might progress faster compared to low-SES children (Volodina et al, 2020)].…”

“…Furthermore, note that the scale on the comprehension of connectives used in our study included three distractors, two that were semantically incorrect and one that was semantically closer to the correct choice (but grammatically inadequate). Several other studies used tests on knowledge of connectives that included only grammatically (but not semantically) fitting foils (e.g., Welie et al, 2017;Kohnen and Retelsdorf, 2019). Across all grades, we found only a slightly higher preference for the distractors that were semantically related to the correct choice.…”

“…In their study, both groups of children were from low-SES families and were demographically at risk for difficulties in literacy tasks. Furthermore, Welie et al (2017) found monolingual Dutch eighth graders to outperform language minority learners on knowledge of connectives; in the same vein, Kohnen and Retelsdorf (2019) recently documented an advanced comprehension of connectives in monolingual German students compared to language minority students in Grade 9.…”

“…Connectives (e.g., despite, therefore) are cohesive devices that explicitly indicate how clauses or sentences are to be meaningfully linked (Degand and Sanders, 2002;Cain and Nash, 2011;Crosson and Lesaux, 2013a,b;Duggleby et al, 2015). In particular, the knowledge of connectives is associated with text comprehension (e.g., Crosson and Lesaux, 2013b;Duggleby et al, 2015;Kohnen and Retelsdorf, 2019), whereas the productive use of connectives is related to more complex argumentation in academic texts (Schmalhofer et al, 2002;Taylor et al, 2019). Previous studies suggest that the knowledge of connectives develops gradually and is not complete when children enter schools (e.g., Crowhurst, 1987;Cain and Nash, 2011;Knoepke et al, 2017).…”

Grundlagen der sprachlichen Bildung

“…Die Bedeutung des Konnektorenverständnisses wurde sowohl für die Vorhersage von fachlichen Leistungen im Lesen und in Mathematik in der Grundschule als auch für das Leseverständnis in der 9. Jahrgangsstufe nachgewiesen (Kohnen & Retelsdorf, 2019) -jeweils unter Berücksichtigung grundlegender sprachlicher Fähigkeiten (z. B. Satzverständnis, Leseflüssigkeit).…”