Awareness of text structure in recognition and production of expository discourse

This study had three purposes in examining college students’ awareness of four expository text structures. The first was to determine whether students were more aware of some text structures than of others in reading and writing. A second was to determine how performance on these text structure measures related to performance on a general comprehension measure. The third was to examine the relationship between awareness of these text structures in reading and writing. Fifty-two college students who were equally divided into two ability groups were given two tasks, one which assessed their awareness of the text structures in reading and the other which assessed awareness in writing. Findings related to the first aim indicated that awareness of the four text structures varied in both the recognition and production of relevant information. With respect to the second aim, performance on both recognition and production measures was related to performance on a general comprehension measure, with high-ability students more sensitive to intrusive information in the recognition task and more able to produce missing text structure information than low-ability students. Findings related to the final aim indicated that the relationship between recognition and production performances was moderate.