Archives


 Vol.2 

Narrative Structure Awareness and L2 Reading Comprehension


Author
Hsueh Lu Lo;Hui-Chuan Lu
Synopsis

This paper aims to examine the interrelationship between narrative structure awareness and L2 reading comprehension. Based upon the triangle structure developed in expositive text reading, we used the theory of narrative structure (Mandler & Johnson(1977)) in Spanish reading to accentuate the importance of structure awareness to the reading comprehension. According to four testing narratives, we find that in reading comprehension there are differences between the experimental group and the control group. The results are as follows: 1. in the experimental group, the perceived structure awareness has helped the 33 students in the experimental group to understand better the basic elements of the story;2.knowing how to analyze the text organization hieratically can improve students' ability in summarizing what they have read. Furthermore, after numbers of sentences and word in the story, we find that the structure awareness may affect more texts with long content and various types of words.

The finding of this paper try to generalize the reading theory of expositive and narrative text structure to help the L2 students to gain better understanding in Spanish reading.