The Effect upon Comprehension of Repatterning Based on Students' Writing Patterns

TESTED THE EFFECT of repatterning passages on the reading comprehension of tenth grade students. Passages from a tenth grade social studies text were repatterned by approximating the syntactic patterns found in a transformational analysis of the writing of the tenth grade subjects who were expected to read the text. Thirtyfour subjects were asked to write 1,000 words of prose dealing With social studies content. The writing was segmented into T-units to derive a synopsis of clause-to-sentence-length factors. Each of the approximately 2,500 T-units generated was analyzed by means of a Linguistic Analysis Worksheet. This quantified the frequency of use of each of 51 different transformations. The derived data were reduced to a mean representing the number of times each transformation was generated per 100 T-units generated by the subjects. Eight social studies passages, consisting of approximately 125 T-units, were subjected to identical analysis. Means were then computed which projected a proportional approximation of the subjects' use of each transformation had they written the 125 T-units. The passages were repatterned, and 16 cloze comprehension tests were constructed over each of the 8 original and 8 repatterned passages. A single multiple choice test was constructed for both the original and repatterned versions of each of passages 2, 4, 6, and 8. While there was no significant difference in the number of correct responses to the multiple choice questions, the results showed significantly more correct responses to cloze items based upon the repatterned passages.