Building Up Knowledge of Language Structures in Adolescent Literacy Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Advances in Technology-Facilitated Language Learning

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore how modifying texts to highlight syntactic structure influences adolescents’ comprehension. We examined whether syntactic scaffolding improved adolescents’ comprehension and the domains of language that were influenced. This study compared students who read texts in Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (cascaded according to phrase and clause structure, VSTF) or traditional block formatting. Sixth grade students in California read their English texts throughout the school year either in traditional formatting (n=76) or in VSTF (n=151). Students in the VSTF condition had higher scores on the 6th grade California Standards Test (CST) when controlling for 5th grade scores. VSTF students outperformed their peers on the vocabulary analysis, written conventions, and writing strategies CST subtests.

Authors

• Youngmin Park, University of California

• Mark Warschauer, University of California - Irvine