Establishing Propositional Relations in Reading Stories

author

  • Esmaeel Abdollahzadeh Associate Professor Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran
Abstract:

This study examined the establishment of coherence relations by Persian EFL learners in their reading of stories. 201 undergraduate EFL learners read narrative passages and selected appropriate coherence elements of different types necessary for the proper construction of meaning. The results demonstrated a consistent pattern of a text-specific hierarchy for the comprehension of conjunctive relations across learners with different proficiency levels. More specifically, adversatives were found to be the easiest connectors by all the three groups followed by causals as the second easiest, then sequentials as the third and more difficult, and additives as the most difficult markers. The results have both theoretical and practical applications and implications for the ‘model building’ hypotheses on the one hand, and reading comprehension and instruction on the other.

Download for Free

Sign up for free to access the full text

Already have an account?login

similar resources

Does Reading Moral Stories Build Character?

The assumption of traditional character educators that children build moral literacy from reading or hearing moral stories is challenged based on research findings. First, research in text comprehension indicates that readers do not understand texts the same way due to differences in reading skill and background knowledge. Second, moral comprehension research indicates that moral arguments are ...

full text

Establishing Distributed Hidden Friendship Relations

The social Web is going mobile and needs support for friendship management in a distributed manner, while privacy concerns mandate con guring the public visibility of one's friends. In this paper we leverage existing Web standards to describe a simple P2P protocol for establishing, enforcing, and revoking hidden friendship relations and report on an implementation for a mobile platform. We exam...

full text

Incidental Vocabulary Learning Through Comprehension-Focused Reading of Short Stories*

This study investigated the amount of incidental vocabulary learning through comprehension-focused reading of short stories and explicit instruction to this goal.  Forty male high school students were selected randomly, and divided into two groups of twenty.  One group of these students was given five 400-word-level short stories to read with the purpose of comprehension, and the students in th...

full text

From Tracking Relations to Propositional Attitudes

I explore the possibility that propositional attitudes are not basic in folk psychology, and that what we really ascribe to people are relations to individuals, those that the apparently propositional contents of beliefs, desires, and other states concern. In particular, the relation between a state and the individuals that it tracks shows how ascription of propositional attitudes could grow ou...

full text

The Role of Visualization in EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension and Recall of Short Stories

Generally speaking, lexical items that enter our minds through reading a text commonly leave us with pictures, sounds, echoes, and feelings in the mind. While the ability to produce images in the mind in the process of reading appears to be vital for greater comprehension and recall of texts, research has indicated that many poor readers seemingly do not visualize as they read. On the contrary,...

full text

Social Cues and Interest in Reading Political News Stories

People tend to prefer information sources that agree with their viewpoints, as predicted by the selective exposure theory, and to associate with people who are like them, a process known as homophily. Scholars raise fears that the combination of these factors can limit the diversity of viewpoints to which people are exposed, particularly when people find news through social network sites. In th...

full text

My Resources

Save resource for easier access later

Save to my library Already added to my library

{@ msg_add @}


Journal title

volume 30  issue 3

pages  1- 20

publication date 2012-09-30

By following a journal you will be notified via email when a new issue of this journal is published.

Hosted on Doprax cloud platform doprax.com

copyright © 2015-2023