Text Comprehension And roduction in University Students: Text Reformulation

• Autores: Tittarelli, Ana María; Piacente, Irma Telma
• Año de publicación: 2006
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Fuente: Orientación y Sociedad, 6, 127-149. (2006)
• Materia: Psicología; Reading comprehension; Summary reformulation; Comprehensive reformulation; Productive reformulation; Text production
• Institución: Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación

This paper sets out to report on findings about features of task-specific reformulation observed in university students in the middle stretch of the Psychology degree course (N=58) and in a reference group of students from the degree courses in Modern Languages, Spanish and Library Studies (N=33) from the National University of La Plata (Argentina). Three types of reformulation were modeled: summary reformulation, comprehensive and productive reformulation.The study was based on a corpus of 621 reformulations rendered from different kinds of text. The versions obtained were categorised according to the following criteria: presence or absence of normative, morphosyntactic and semantic difficulties. Findings show that problems arise particularly with paraphrase and summary writing. Observation showed difficulties concerning punctuation, text cohesion and coherence , and semantic distortion or omission as regards extracting and/or substituting gist, with limited lexical resources and confusion as to suitability of style/register in writing. The findings in this study match those of earlier, more comprehensive research on the issue and report on problems experienced by a significant number of university students when interacting with both academic texts and others of a general nature. Moreover, they led to questions, on the one hand, as to the nature of such difficulties, which appear to be production-related problems and indirectly account for inadequate text comprehension, and on the other hand, as to the features of university tuition when it comes to text handling.
Fil: Piacente, Irma Telma. Secretary of Science and Technics, National University of La Plata, School of Psychology (Argentina).