Text Differences: Children's Perceptions at the Transition Stage in Reading.

Abstract

Educators commonly believe that upper elementary students find ex pository material (e.g., content area texts) more difficult to comprehend than narrative, story-like material. Empirical studies (Boljonis and Kaye, 1980; Dixon, 1979) generally have supported this belief. Teachers' ex planations of why children find content area materials more difficult have pointed to such factors as students' lack of experience in deal ing with expository structure, their unfamiliarity with the vocabulary or content, and their inability to process the heavy concept load. An important yet little understood question is whether children are able to explain why a chapter in their social studies text may be more difficult to comprehend than a story in their basal reader. Perhaps more basic to the issue is whether students do, in fact, perceive differences be tween narrative and expository text. This study addressed the latter ques tion.