Comparing the strategic behavior of more successful vs. less successful readers of multiple technical reading texts

Abstract

Recently, reading researchers have come to assume that the ability to synthesize units of information across multiple texts on a topic by comparing, contrasting, synthesizing, integrating, and building a mental representation of them – referred to as multiple-documents literacy – is a far more required literacy in the present knowledge societies than understanding a single text. However, this has been mainly outside English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts and no attention has been directed toward multiple documents literacy in ELT. Therefore, the present study is a first attempt at introducing multiple-texts comprehension research into ELT by comparing the strategies employed while reading these texts. To this aim, 81 Midwifery students were given a multiple text comprehension test and were tested through an Intertextual Inference Verification Task. The protocol notes and the reading strategies of the 15 highest-scoring participants and the 15 lowest-scoring participants were analyzed. The results of the study demonstrated a significant difference between the two groups of readers in both the overall use of metacognitive strategies and in the global, problem solving and support subtypes of these strategies with the more successful readers employing a greater number of strategies while reading multiple technical documents. The results of protocol analyses, moreover, suggested that more successful readers recruit a significantly greater number of analytic and pragmatic strategies while reading multiple technical reading texts.