Establishing coherence in schoolbook texts: How connectives and layout affect students' text comprehension

Abstract

This article focuses on the influence of connectives (because, so) and layout (continuous placement of sentences versus each sentence beginning on a new line) on the quality of students’ mental representations. By using multiple comprehension tasks, we found that cohesive text features have different effects on each facet of deeper text comprehension. On local comprehension tasks (i.e. bridging inference questions), all students performed better after reading history texts containing connectives than after reading texts without these markers. On global comprehension tasks (i.e. sorting tasks), pre-vocational students performed better when coherence relations were marked, regardless of layout, while pre-un iversity students did not need connectives as long as texts were presented in a natural, continuous way. These findings indicate that connectives are an important factor in creating comprehensible texts, in particular for pre-vocational students. Finally, we conclude there is a mismatch between these findings and the current practice in designing optimal educational texts, at least in the Netherlands.