THE INFLUENCE OF CONNECTIVES ON READING COMPREHENSION: EFL LEARNERS READING AN EXPOSITORY TEXT IN ENGLISH

Resumo

Drawing on research in the field of reading comprehension, the present study proposes to investigate the effects of connectives on the comprehension of an expository text in English. To do so, three objectives were settled: a) to investigate whether the reading time will be affected by the presence/absence of connectives; b) to investigate whether the recall will be affected by the presence/absence of connectives, and c) to investigate whether comprehension will be affected by the presence/absence of connectives. The data were collected from 16 native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese who were evenly divided in two groups: the original text group and the manipulated text group. Firstly, they read a text in English in which reading time was measured. Secondly, they wrote, in Portuguese, a recall protocol stating as much as they could remember from that text. Finally, they answered comprehension questions, in Portuguese, about that text. The analysis consisted of interpretation and constructions of meanings from the data collected. Results suggest that even though the use of connectives did not affect the reading time of the text, in general, the presence of connectives positively influences reading comprehension.