ABSTRACT
This paper reports a study with British children between the ages of ten and twelve. The primary focus of the overall project was on learning from text (rather than recognition comprehension). In the study discussed here, young students with differing levels of background knowledge on the text topics and differing levels of pragmatic awareness in interpreting conversational interactions read two of three structurally parallel texts on different topics. It was predicted that students with good “pragmatic skills” would be more successful at making sense of difficult (i.e., topically less familiar) texts than those who had shown less pragmatic awareness in interpreting conversational contributions. The study revealed that while conversational understanding was not a significant predictor of the amount students could recall of these texts, it did play a significant role in their ability to recognise or construct the rhetorical structure of the texts, as measured by the analysis of free recalls.
