Facilitating ESL Reading by Teaching Text Structure

Abstract

Recent research has shown that the rhetorical organization of narrative and expository texts interacts with the formal schemata of native English-speaking readers (the readers' background knowledge of and experience with textual organization) to affect reading. Researchers have recently shown that formal, rhetorical schemata have similar effects on reading in English as a second language. Moreover, the research in native English reading has shown that explicit teaching of various aspects of text structure can facilitate first language reading. This article reports a controlled training study designed to answer the related question for second language reading, Can we facilitate ESL reading by explicit teaching of text structure? The results indicate that training on the top-level rhetorical organization of expository texts significantly increased the amount of information that 25 intermediate-level ESL students could recall.