ABSTRACT
This research analyses the role that awareness of textual structure and skill in ranking ideas in a text according to their relative importance in the text structure play in comprehension and recall of the most important information in expository prose We were also interested in comparing the results obtained with different measures of awareness of textual structure. Thirty-two fifth-grade children from an Elementary School of Valencia (Spain) participated in this study. Four independent measures were taken: decoding, intelligence, evaluating sentences in a text according to their relative importance to the textual structure, and three different tests of awareness of textual structure. Three dependent measures were selected: writing down the explicit main idea of several texts, writing down the implicit main idea of other texts, and recalling the most important information of a text. Data analysis confirmed the role that awareness of textual structure plays in getting the implicit main idea and in recalling the most important information of expository prose. Nevertheless, we obtained different results with the different measures we employed. The role of the skill in ranking ideas in a text is confirmed only for getting the implicit main idea. Some theoretical and practical educational implications are discussed.
