The Effects of top-level structure instruction on grade eight Bhutsnese students'reading comprehension and written synthesis

Abstract

The three aims of the present investigation were; 1) to examine which top-level structure was the most difficult for grade eight Bhutanese ESL students to comprehend, 2) to identify the effects of the top-level structure instruction on grade eight Bhutanese ESL readers’ reading comprehension and 3) to examine whether the awareness of the top-level structure in the source texts enable the grade eight Bhutanese ESL readers as writers while they are composing their written synthesis. The general reading comprehension test consisted of three top-level structures: description, cause and effects, and compare and contrast. The test was given to 80 grade eight ESL Bhutanese students at Samtse Lower Secondary School in Southern Bhutan. From the test scores, the population was screened to include only the top-20 and bottom-20 scoring students as the research participants. From the test, it was found that the texts with cause and effect top-level structure was the most difficult to understand by the readers. As a result, an English test consisting of six expository texts with cause and effect top-level structure was developed to measure the participants’ reading comprehension before the experiment. After the pre-test, the participants were taught to read expository texts with cause and effect top-level structure. At the end of each lesson, the participants were asked to write a reflective journal about their lesson. The participants were then asked to compose a written synthesis by synthesizing information from 3 source texts with the cause and effect top-level structure and approximately of the same length. 2-able- and 2 less-able participants were asked to volunteer to do the think-aloud while they composed their written synthesis. They were afterwards asked to sit for a semistructured interview which was carried out to support the data gathered from the think-aloud protocol. A post-test, which was identical to the pre-test, was administered to all the participants two weeks later to measure the improvement of their reading ability. The arithmetic mean ( x ), standard deviation (SD) and sample t-test were used to compare the able- and less-able readers’ pre-test and the post-test scores and there was a significant statistical difference between the mean scores of the less-able- and able-readers (p<0.05). It indicated that the able-readers performed better than the lessable readers in comprehending the cause and effect expository texts. The participants were also asked to compose their own text by synthesizing the information from 3 expository source texts which had the same top-level structure, cause and effect and approximately the same lengths. It was found that the able readers included more ideas from the 3 source texts than the less-able readers. The participants’ reflective journals were analyzed into themes using the coding system on the basis of grounded theory. The 2-able- and 2 less-able participants’ think-aloud protocol and the semistructured interview results were also analyzed using the coding system on the basis of grounded theory. From the analysis of the qualitative data it was found out that the instruction of the cause and effect top-level structure enhanced the grade eight Bhutanese ESL readers’ reading comprehension and their written synthesis from multiple expository texts.