Date of Award
1991
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Bachelor of Education Honours
School
School of Education
First Supervisor
Dr Peter Sloan
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a pre-reading expository writing task on comprehension of expository text. It was undertaken in order to ascertain the usefulness of writing as a pre-reading activity in the development of schema theoretic reading teaching strategies. The theoretical position of the study was that writing before reading would activate prior knowledge in the form of content and structure in the working memory of the reader and thereby enhance reading comprehension. The sample, comprised selected from a small, of 51 year 6/7 students, school in the outskirts of was the metropolitan area. These students were systematically allocated to one of three equivalent groups on the basis of standardised reading comprehension test results. The experiment followed a three group, post-test only design, with two control groups and one experimental. The experimental group participated in a 20 minute writing activity on the topic of animal conservation. One control group participated in a writing activity on the topic of "television”, while the other control participated iq maths activities, i.e., they did not write, At the conclusion of this 20 minute session, all groups read a text about animal conservation then completed a probe question comprehension test containing explicit and inferential questions relating to the text. The results of the short answer test were quantified in two sections, i.e., responses to explicit questions and responses to inferential questions, and the results were analysed by one way analysis of variance.
Recommended Citation
Day, W. B. (1991). The effect of expository writing as a pre-reading activity on comprehension of expository text. Edith Cowan University. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses_hons/226