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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 3, pp 439–462 | Cite as

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

  • Emilio Sánchez
  • J. Ricardo García
  • Andrea Bustos
Article
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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.

Keywords

Expository texts Rhetorical devices Rhetorical competence Reading comprehension Literacy 
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Notes

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. 1.Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of PsychologySalamanca UniversitySalamancaSpain
  2. 2.Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of EducationSalamanca UniversitySalamancaSpain
  3. 3.School of PedagogyPontificia Universidad Católica de ValparaísoSausalitoChile

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