Connectivity, Text Type, and Text Comprehension: Benefit Potentials of Discourse Markers

Prior research on the role of textual markers in reading comprehension suggests a complex picture of the relationship between textual signals and comprehension. These studies have come up with positive, neutral, and differential effects of these markers on processing and comprehension. This book investigates how Iranian undergraduate readers of English approach narrative, expository, and argumentative text types in which propositional relations have been explicitly or implicitly marked. The performance of the participants on different text types is examined to discover the effect of the type of text, textual signaling, and text structure on the comprehension of the learners in both the explicit and the implicit versions. The results contribute to our understanding of the rhetorical and cognitive nature of different text types and the positive role of logical connectors in their comprehension. The research helps language teachers, testers, and materials developers further consider the relationship between textual signals and text types in devising appropriate materials and techniques to improve language learners¿ reading and writing.