How do cohesion features inform science instruction for English learners?: A comparison study of digital and printed science texts

ABSTRACT

Cohesion plays an important role in science texts as their comprehension depends much on structural and textual signalling, which demonstrates the organisation of the text, the logical links of ideas, and the intended purpose of the writer. Particularly, research has shown that English learners (ELs) rely more on cohesive markers than their English-speaking peers during the reading process. To promote students’ reading comprehension in science, understanding how cohesion features are used to construct texts and providing pertinent instructions are important for practitioners. This study investigated a series of cohesion features commonly adopted in middle school science texts in the U.S. – in digital and printed texts respectively, through Coh-Metrix – and compared their frequency using Hotelling’s T-Squared test. This study is one of the pioneer studies that incorporated digital texts for cohesion analysis. Inclusion of the digital texts is meaningful as the pandemic facilitated technology uses in the U.S public school and elsewhere. Results showed that (1) commonly used cohesion features included additive connectives, 2nd person pronouns, and local referential cohesion, and (2) compared with the printed version of science texts, the digital version presented higher cohesion as indicated by index scores. The instructional implications for practitioners are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Cohesion
• digital text
• English learner instruction

Acknowledgements

We confirm that the manuscript has not been published and is not being considered for publication in other journals. All the authors contributed from the project conception to the writing of the manuscript and agreed with the content and submission to the International Journal of Science Education. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. This research project used science texts for its data source and did not involve human participants or personal data. Thus, no ethics approval was required.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).