Description and interactions of informative text structure knowledge and skills of French-speaking Grade 6 students

Abstract

This study was conducted in the province of Quebec, Canada, among French-speaking Grade 6 students (n = 175) in the context of a school curriculum that does not clearly address text structure and main idea instruction. It aims to understand whether these students can identify informative text structures and main ideas in isolated paragraphs, comprehend main ideas and text structure in an informative text, and write a short structured informative text. It also describes relationships between these knowledge and skills coming from different reading and writing tasks. Three assessments relative to informative text structures were administered: a multiple-choice test on text structure knowledge and identification of main ideas, a reading comprehension test, and a short writing task. Results revealed that students performed better in the multiple-choice assessment compared to other assessments. Correlations between variables stemming from the three assessments were significant but their effect sizes were low to moderate. A hypothesized model was investigated via a path analysis suggesting that structure knowledge and main idea identification influence reading comprehension, which then influence writing.