A Comparison of recall between Narrative and Expository Text Structure

Several researches have well established that skilled readers employ a variety of strategies to comprehend written text (Stanovich, 2000; Sweet & Snow 2003). Text structures help reader to relate concepts within the text to organize and infer information. The present study aims at examining the recall of structure awareness of female and male in terms of idea units, in recall differences between the two genders and in the use of top level structures by EFL learners. To this end, 60 EFL students (30 male & 30 female) enrolled in third year of university were randomly selected. They read a narrative and an expository text silently; afterwards, they were asked to write whatever they recalled from the passage in their own words. Next, the paragraphs in the two texts were divided according to idea units (Meyer and Freedle, 1984) which comprised the top level, high level, mid level, and low level structures. The results showed a greater recall in the expository passage in both groups; in addition, the number of idea units recalled by females was higher than that of the males in all four levels. Top level structure was recalled more than other text structures

Keywords:

text structure , idea unit , top level structure , narrative , expository