8 - Text structure and comprehension

Summary

To reiterate a point in the preceding chapter, good texts are not a collection of randomly assorted sentences. Rather, they are carefully structured to convey semantic relationships among their elements, as well as to signal the comparative importance of discrete ideas. Significant elements, for example, often are placed in prominent text locations to highlight their relative weight and are connected with other text segments in clearly detectable ways. Coherent texts, moreover, have distinct, easily identifiable structural characteristics. Meyer and Rice (1984) define text structure as the specific ways in which “ideas in a text are interrelated to convey a message to a reader” (p. 319). Logically, then, knowledge of text structure should enhance text-meaning construction in measurable ways. Inasmuch as information emphasized in disparate discourse genres differs as a natural consequence of the diversity in communicative functions and intent, text structure also varies from genre to genre. Consequently, systematic analyses of text structure across discourse genres yield significant cues on an additional requirement underlying successful text comprehension.

The primary objective in this chapter, consequently, is to elucidate the specific impact of text-structure variables on discourse comprehension. At the outset, two major text types – narrative and exposition – are described and cross-linguistic comparisons of distinct text-structure properties are examined. On the basis of empirical findings, the role of structural variables in L2 text comprehension is then examined.