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Does rhetorical competence moderate the effect of rhetorical devices on the comprehension of expository texts beyond general comprehension skills?

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Abstract

Many studies have demonstrated the facilitating role of rhetorical devices in text comprehension, but there are also studies where rhetorical devices have not shown such effect. The present study sets out to explore whether readers’ knowledge of rhetorical devices (that is, rhetorical competence) moderates their effectiveness beyond general comprehension skills and, consequently, whether rhetorical competence may be considered a component skill of reading comprehension. 192 sixth- to seventh-grade students were assessed on rhetorical competence and were required to read a difficult marked text with specific rhetorical devices (a refutation, an objective, and four organizational signals) or the same text without them. After reading, students produced a summary in order to obtain three dependent variables: main ideas (as a measure of participants’ ability to select relevant information from the text), causal links between them (as an indicator of participants’ ability to grasp the logical structure of the text and to organize its ideas), and the combination of main ideas plus causal links (as an indicator of participants’ global comprehension of the text). Analyses controlling for general comprehension skills and other important variables (working memory, prior knowledge, decoding) demonstrated that: (a) readers of the marked text scored higher in terms of all dependent variables, and (b) rhetorical competence level moderated the effect of rhetorical devices on the composite measure (main ideas plus causal links) and on the organization of the summary by means of causal links.

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Acknowledgments

Support for this research and the writing of this paper was provided by a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (EDU2012-33593) and a third author’s grant funded by the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (Conicyt) from Chile. We wish to thank the heads, teachers and students of the eight primary schools from Valparaíso (Chile) that participated in the study reported here: San Luis, San Ignacio de Loyola, Barros Luco, Jorge Williams, Seminario San Rafael, San Judas Tadeo, Internacional and Colegio Rubén Castro.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Salamanca University, Avda. de la Merced 109-131, 37005, Salamanca, Spain

    Emilio Sánchez

  2. Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Education, Salamanca University, Pº Canalejas, 169, 37008, Salamanca, Spain

    J. Ricardo García

  3. School of Pedagogy, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Avda. El Bosque 1290, Sausalito, Viña del Mar, Chile

    Andrea Bustos

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  1. Emilio Sánchez
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Correspondence to J. Ricardo García.

Appendix: Translation of “The Mediterranean Is Dying”

Appendix: Translation of “The Mediterranean Is Dying”

The state of the waters of the Mediterranean is described by experts as alarming, and some have even mentioned the imminent death of this historic sea.

With a surface area five times greater than Spain and an average depth of 1400 m (which makes it a relatively small sea), its waters lap the shores of 18 countries, continually receiving the urban and industrial waste of more than 150 million people. If we also consider the refuse generated by the 100 million tourists who visit its coasts every summer—a number that could double over the next 25 years—it is clear that these waters are irredeemably condemned to become a foul sewer.

Given that the Mediterranean’s waters are only renewed through the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, they are unable to support all this waste, which includes the millions and millions of tons of highly contaminating, extraordinarily dangerous toxic waste that are pumped into the water—petrol, mercury, lead, and so on.

Furthermore, the dumping of organic materials and fertilizers is leading to the growth of massive algae colonies, which cause problems for many of the living things that inhabit the sea.

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Sánchez, E., García, J.R. & Bustos, A. Does rhetorical competence moderate the effect of rhetorical devices on the comprehension of expository texts beyond general comprehension skills?. Read Writ 30, 439–462 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-016-9684-2

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