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Scientific Text Structure Awareness: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Of Tertiary Students From Different Language Backgrounds, Catherine Mcloughlin

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Research in both first and second language reading has shown that awareness of text structure, or rhetorical organisation is related to superior recall of main ideas from expository prose passages. The present study investigates awareness of scientific text structure among tertiary students from different language backgrounds. In this investigation, four reading passages containing two rhetorical text structures found in scientific discourse, comparison/contrast and problem/solution are employed. Meyer’s (1975) hierarchical content structure analysis was used to analyse the texts into top, high, mid and low level ideas corresponding to main and supporting ideas. The research questions were centred around three major …