Strategies for Expository and Literary Texts

Abstract

Based on the assumption that reading strategies facilitate text comprehension and that they should differ regarding types of texts, this study aims at analysing which cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies are applied by university students (N = 54) for reading a narrative text compared to an expository text. To measure text-specific reading strategies, different channels of information were included such as highlighting of text segments qualitatively and quantitatively, qualitative and quantitative note-taking as well as the coherence of notes, and self-reported strategy use after reading. The findings show that students’ highlighting of text segments and note-taking differ regarding the type of text in amount and depth of processing, indicating a greater depth of processing for narrative texts. The self-reported strategies for reading the two types of texts also reveal differences in terms of the frequencies of applying elaborative and metacognitive strategies. Moreover, correlation analyses show that there is more correspondence between the reading strategies in the narrative condition compared to the expository condition. In sum, the students adapt their reading strategies to the types of texts and it appears that narrative text was read in a more strategic and deeply oriented manner than the expository text.