The effects of genre on text comprehension: Online and offline processing of narrative and expository texts

Abstract

Several studies have addressed the question which text genre is most beneficial to students' text comprehension: narrative or expository texts. Evidence was inconclusive: whereas some researchers found a beneficial effect of the implementation of narrative elements, others found that comprehension of narrative texts was worse than that of expository texts. The most compelling evidence came from studies combining online and offline measures of reading and text comprehension. However, this had not yet been done for students in primary education. The current study examined which text genre lead to the best text representation in students in grade 4: narrative or expository versions of Biology and Geography texts. Text comprehension and text appreciation were measured via questionnaires and reading processes were measured online via eye-tracking. Contrary to theoretical implications, students did not find either genre more attractive. Their text comprehension was not predicted by genre either. Observed effects of narrative texts on online processing were only present for Biology texts and all were temporary: less regressions and shorter initial reading times were limited to just the first sentences containing factual information. Both observations implicate less processing difficulties for the narrative texts in comparison to the expository texts. Two hypotheses were put forward. First, the manipulations could have been more successful for Biology texts, which implicates that narratives are facilitating the online processing and perhaps also for Geography if the manipulations were larger. The other hypothesis is that the subject Geography is less suited for adding narrative features because the expository version is already more similar to narratives. Adding more narrative features would not make it easier to process the text. It is concluded that there is no need for educational publisher to implement narrative texts in the curriculum, as the benefits are very limited.