PDF #29 – Al-Surmi, Mansoor – Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension
Discourse Markers and Reading Comprehension – This paper is a contribution to the studies conducted for investigating the relationship between text linguistic signals and reading understanding. The aim of this paper is to test the hypothesis that discourse markers facilitate reading understanding . The specific question addressed is whether the presence of discourse markers facilitates reading understanding at a global level (i.e., at the discourse level).
Two groups of L2 learners were given a text followed by multiple choice comprehension questions. One group was given the actual text, while the other group was given the same text with discourse markers removed. The results indicated that there were no differences in the performance of the two groups. The study concluded that presence or absence of discourse markers may have no effect on the overall representation of coherent information needed for reading understanding.
Reading comprehension is an outcome of text processing that involves the construction of a coherent cognitive representation of the information in the text. That representation is established by integrating the information provided in text units and understanding the coherence relations that bond those text units to each other (Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Cohesion, according to Halliday and Hasan (1976), are realized through four main elements: connectives such as conjunctions and some lexical expressions, cataphoric and anaphoric references, substitution as in using pronouns instead of nouns, and ellipsis. These features act together to structure text information in a coherent way for readers.
According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers’ comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through examining the subjects’ recognition of DMs. To carry out the research, 86 Iranian sophomores majoring in English took a test of DMs alongside a RC test. The correlation between their scores on the two tests was calculated using the software SPSS. The analysis revealed that there is high correlation between the students’ knowledge of DMs (i.e., their correct recognition of discourse markers) and their reading comprehension (rxy = .71). Moreover, high correlation carries a strong regression power and scores on a test of DMs could be a good indicator of the test takers’ reading ability.
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