The effect of text cohesion on reading comprehension: Under which conditions do temporal cohesion markers have an impact on comprehension?

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During the project extension the project continues to deal with the topic how and under which circumstances text cohesion affects reading comprehension of students attending 9th class. Based on the results from the first project phase we are going to analyze two specific cohesion markers and their impact on reading comprehension: temporal adverbs and tense. Thereby the project receives stronger linguistic emphasis. One of the central results of the first project phase is that texts with higher degree of cohesion did not promote reading comprehension of students with low learning abilities. (1) Thus in a first study we analyze how readers with high or low reading abilities process texts manipulated in its degree of temporal cohesion (e.g. with thinking-aloud procedure). (2) Secondly, we experimentally investigate the isolated and combined impact of temporal adverbs and tense on reading comprehension while controlling for individual learning abilities. (3) In the third place we implement a training-study to observe if students with low learning abilities profit more from the text cohesion manipulation when they receive a specific training before. This training coordinates the relevant knowledge about cohesion markers regarding a concrete text. We estimate that the trained students profit more from the cohesion manipulations than students who did not exercise the training. With this training-study we would like to point out exemplarily that a sustained promotion of reading comprehension needs a twofold approach: a coordination of text manipulation approaches with fostering learning abilities approaches (e.g. via strategy trainings), which in the recent years mostly developed independently of each other.