VISUALIZING READING COMPREHENSION: UNDERSTANDING THE INFLUENCE OF TEXT STRUCTURES ON READERS’ KNOWLEDGE STRUCTURES
Open Access
- Author:
- Kim, Kyung
- Graduate Program:
- Learning, Design, and Technology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 20, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Roy B. Clariana, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Roy B. Clariana, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Simon Hooper, Committee Member
Priya Sharma, Committee Member
Ping Li, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Knowledge Structure
Text Structure - Abstract:
- My intention is to further validate and extend the application of “knowledge structure (KS)” analysis methods beyond monolingual into bilingual reading settings. This investigation applies KS analysis methods to describe the influence of narrative and expository lesson texts on bilingual readers’ KS. Monolingual native language (L1) reading studies have established that text type, or genre, strongly influences reading comprehension, and narrative texts are easier to recall and understand than expository texts, indicating that the comprehensibility of the content may differ depending on the genre in which it is presented. Thus, it is important to understand reading comprehension differences that are triggered by different text genres. However, the effects of text genres on reading comprehension have rarely been the focus of target language (L2) reading research, where the few L2 studies have reached different conclusions about their relative difficulty. In addition, I consider the interaction of prior knowledge and text genres in L2 reading contexts. The inconclusive and few reported findings in an L2 reading context may largely be due to methodological difficulty because L2 reading is an extraordinarily complex process dependent upon reader-related and text-related factors that are far more varied than those implicated in L1 reading. For this methodological problem, this investigation proposes a “KS analysis model” to better understand the interactions between pre-reading KS and text genre and between text genre and post-reading KS. An additional aim of this study is to assess how language proficiency modulates the interactions. For that, university mixed proficiency Korean English language learners (n = 616) were randomly assigned to one of 8 conditions that all involved a pre-reading task in L1 or L2 (as a sorting task), reading a text, then from memory a post-reading task in L1 or L2 (as a summary writing), and finally a comprehension posttest (e.g., sort Korean or English, read English expository or narrative text, write Korean or English, posttest). All of the participants’ sorting and essay artifacts were converted into Pathfinder Networks (PFnets) that were visually and statistically compared with each lesson text’s PFnet they read. For the PFnet analysis, this investigation employed two distinctly different ‘graph theoretic’ metrics, “Similarity of PFnet” and “Centrality of PFnet”, in order to analyze the PFnets statistically and to visually describe the interactions between text genre and pre- and post-reading KS by proficiency level. The results from the similarity and centrality of PFnets showed that the low proficiency participants’ comprehension of the same text content was greater in the L1 task language and in the narrative text, while the high proficiency participants’ comprehension did not differ as functions of task language and text genre. With respect to prior knowledge interaction, both low and high proficiency participants maintained their pre-reading KS more for the expository text than the narrative text. These findings from the current study can have practical implications for their L2 reading instruction. Narrative texts would be more beneficial to L2 readers who do have lower L2 proficiency because of its superior comprehensibility, while expository texts would be more beneficial to L2 readers who have enough prior knowledge of to-be-learned content because of its tendency to integrate content with prior knowledge.