An Investigation of Fourth-Graders' Comprehension of Pronoun Constructions in Ecologically Valid Texts

content of the antecedent (vis-a-vis Lesgold, 1974). This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:37:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 576 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Number 4, 1982 XVII/4 2. a lack of familiarity with expository type prose (noted as important by Kintsch, 1977) which directly minimizes a naive reader's (a transition stage for fourth-graders as noted by Baker & Stein, 1978) ability to organize information in the text, thus interfering with the comprehension of pronoun structures and antecedents. 3. a general lack of cohesiveness (as noted by Fredericksen, 1977) in the events, actions, or body of information presented in expository prose that places greater demands on the naive reader to sort, organize, store, and retrieve pronoun structures and antecedents. 4. a lack of knowledge base, especially with expository-social studies content-prose, that diminishes the semantic meaningfulness of the text (as noted by Frederiksen, 1977) and therefore the processing of pronoun structures in semantic memory. The difficulty of comprehending pronoun structures in expository prose is further supported by the significant simple main effects (p <.001) of factor B (type of prose) at both level C1 (intact pronoun constructions) and at level C2 (replaced pronoun constructions). (See table 6 for group means.) Regardless of pronoun constructions, fourth-graders have more success answering comprehension questions on narrative passages than on social studies expository passages. It appears that attempts to account for the differences in performance on pronoun-specific comprehension questions when pronoun constructions are embedded in expository and narrative prose might profitably begin with a delineation of the difference in the text characteristics, organization, cohesiveness, and familiarity. Placement of Questions in Expository Prose The significant simple main effects of factor A (placement of comprehension questions) at level B1 (expository passages) and the lack of a significant simple main effect at level B2 (narrative passages) also confirms the difficulty of answering not only pronoun-specific comprehension questions but also general comprehension questions in expository passages. More specifically, whether comprehension questions are asked during or after passage reading does not appear to make a difference in narrative material. However, this is not the case with expository passages. Fourth-graders answering comprehension questions during the reading of an expository passage correctly answered more questions than students who answered comprehension questions after reading an expository passage. The results for expository passages are consistent with the overall picture of research findings on the effects of question position This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:37:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ecological validity KAMEENUI & CARNINE 577 suggesting that children exhibit greater retention when interspersed questions are asked. There are many reasons that can be offered to explain the effectiveness of using an interspersed questioning procedure for expository prose reading. It can be argued that interspersed questions effectively serve to control the reader's attention during passage reading (especially with unfamiliar, abstract content) while also providing sequential semantic cues about the flow of events in the text which likely increases successful semantic processing. Perhaps the most obvious reason for the success of an interspersed questioning procedure is its effect in minimizing the memory demands on the reading task. By asking questions at periodic target points in the expository passage, the reader is responsible for holding only smaller chunks of information in storage. This is in direct contrast to questions that are asked after an entire passage has been read. The position of these questions force the reader not only to hold more information in storage, especially detailed pronoun and antecedent information, but to also sift, sort, and identify information as relevant or irrelevant, and to maintain what Winograd (1977) characterizes as an schema of the information that is continually being created and acquired during the reading of the text. It appears that the creation and maintenance of these instantiated schemata during the reading of an expository text may be difficult for fourthgraders. The easy comprehensibility of narrative passages is further evidenced by the significant (p <.00 1) simple main effects of type of prose (B) on general comprehension questions asked after (A1) and during (A2) passage reading. It appears that regardless of when general comprehension questions are asked, fourth-graders have greater success answering those questions for narrative passages than expository passages. The same simple main effects analysis of type of prose (B) at both levels of factor A (placement of questions) for pronoun-specific comprehension questions reveal similar signficant (p <.001) findings. Limitations of research that strives for ecological validity are numerous. In the present study, the seeming greater difficulty of expository selections could result from a naturally occurring greater frequency of particular pronoun constructions in expository text. Conversely, the difficulty might have less to do with the pronoun constructions than with the organization familiarity, cohesiveness, and conceptual difficulty of expository passages. To resolve these difficulties, researchers might revert to contrived passages, in which the number of each type of pronoun construction as well as the conceptual difficulty of the content is held constant across the narrative and expository passages. The difficulty with this approach is that attempts to generate This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:37:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 578 READING RESEARCH QUARTERLY * Number 4, 1982 XVII/4 commensurability might eradicate critical differences between expository and narrative selections. This difficulty brings to light the need for operational definitions of expository and narrative prose. Research could then assess performance differences between and poor readers along those dimensions. In spite of the limitations and unanswered questions, it appears that fourth-grade students have greater difficulty comprehending expository than narrative passages. Various responses to this problem are possible. For example, longitudinal research may find that as students have greater contact with expository material, their difficulties will diminish. Another option is to provide some kind of instructional strategy for identifying and simplifying pronoun structures that appear in expository passages, as well as a strategy for organizing, extracting, and rehearsing important chunks of expository text that would serve to increase children's success of answering pronoun-specific and general comprehension questions (cf., Dommes, Gersten, & Carnine, Note 1). The need for instructional research could be justified in part by considering that the sample of fourth-graders participating in this study could be classified as primarily good comprehenders with a mean grade equivalent reading score of 5.8.2 Only four obtained reading scores were below the fourth-grade reading level. Given the interface between the high reading level of the selected sample in this experiment and their poor performance on pronoun-specific comprehension questions for expository passages containing pronoun constructions, it can be construed that the transitional period from third to fourth grade as characterized by Baker and Stein (1978) is indeed a period of change and movement from an instructional stage involving a great deal of reading and practice on narrative prose to a new stage requiring extensive reading of expository prose. A third option proposed by Richek (1976), involves rewriting textbook materials so that they are not as difficult. The intent would be to reduce the chasm that exists between much expository and narrative material. (Davison, 1981, has raised several concerns about rewriting texts to simplify syntactic forms. Her work dealt primarily with subordinate constructions, logical connectives, etc., and not pronoun constructions.) Finally, the results of this experiment provide some support for Bormuth, Carr, Manning, and Pearson's (1970) finding that personal pronouns are a difficult anaphoral structure to comprehend. However, this support must be viewed cautiously since comparing results across This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:37:55 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Ecological validity KAMEENUI & CARNINE 579 different studies are strained by the significantly different experimental tasks and response measures employed. The results further suggest that any hierarchical taxonomy attempting to specify an ordering of the relative difficulty between various syntactic structures without a strong regard for the type of prose in which those structures occur will likely be misleading. Any analygis of syntactic structures may be better examined in a prose context instead of in isolation or in isolated abbreviated sentences.