Assessing Learners’ Comprehension of Logical Connectives in L2 Texts

Abstract

To successfully comprehend a text, readers must be able to establish coherent representation of its meaning. Construction of coherent text representation presupposes an ability to identify coherence relations that bind discourse segments together. These relations can be implicit or marked by a variety of linguistic devices such as logical connectives and signaling phrases. While there has been a growing awareness among the teachers and EFL material writers about the important role that knowledge of marker words plays in comprehension of L2 discourse, there is only a limited number of suitable test designs that allow assessment of learners’ understanding of these words. The current paper summarizes the major findings of the research on the role of discourse markers in text processing and presents two test formats that could be used to measure students’ understanding of conjunctions as text structure markers: a ‘paraphrase’ judgment task and text diagrams. The advantages and potential limitations of each test format are examined from both the teacher and the student perspectives.