文章連貫性、閱讀能力與兒童科學理解表徵之研究

Text Coherence, Reading Ability, and Children's Scientific Understanding

本研究之目的有三：（1）探討文章連貫性的改寫原則是否能有助於改善學童的文本；（2）文章連貫性的編寫原則是否有助於修改科學性的文本；（3）探討讀者閱讀能力和文章連貫性是否有交互作用存在。本研究選取兩篇科學性文章的自然文本，依據四個文章編修原則(論詞重複原則、概念清晰化原則、改變句子和段落順序原則及增加鉅觀結構)來進行改寫。受試者為91 名國小六年級學生，依其閱讀能力分為高能力和低能力兩組，並隨機分派閱讀「原始版本」或「改編版本」。所有的受試者均接受「自由回憶」、「文本理解」和「推論理解」的測量。結果顯示：
閱讀改編版本(連貫性高)學童的理解表現優於原始版本的學童。高能力的學童表現的較低能力的學童佳。閱讀能力和文章連貫性的交互作用效果發生於其中一篇文章推論層次的理解。此交互作用代表低能力的讀者在回答推論層次的問題時，獲益於文章連貫性的操弄，而高能力的讀者並沒有這樣的現象。本文最後就此一發現探討其教育上的應用。

The purposes of this study were (1) to examine whether principles of revision that improve the coherence of text, which have been used successfully on texts for advanced readers, can also be used in revising young readers' texts; (2) to investigate whether the principles used to revise history texts can be applied to scientific texts and (3) to look at the interaction between text coherence and reading ability. Two authentic scientific texts (on diabetes and on pain) were revised according to four revision principles, providing argument-overlap, making implicit concepts explicit, changing order of sentences and paragraphs, and adding macro-structure to the text. Ninety-one 6th-grade students were divided into low-ability and high-ability groups and randomly assigned to read either the original texts or the revised texts. Participants' comprehension was measured by free recall, questions assessing knowledge of the textbase (which assessed a shallow level of comprehension), and inference questions (which assessed a deep level of comprehension). Results indicated that young readers' comprehension was superior when the coherent version of the texts was read. High-ability readers performed better than low-ability readers. A significant interaction between text coherence and reading ability emerged on the inference questions for one of the texts. That is, low-ability readers' performance on the inference questions was better when the text was coherent, whereas high ability readers' performance was not improved by making the text coherent. Thus the text coherence affected the deep comprehension level of these low-ability readers. This finding is discussed in terms of its educational implications.