Anaphoric resolution during the reading of expository texts by undergraduate students

ABSTRACT

To succeed at university, students need to read expository texts effectively and meaningfully in order to access and understand information, and internalise it for study purposes. Reading is a complex, multi-componential phenomenon that includes both decoding and comprehension processes. An important component of the comprehension process is the reader's ability to integrate current information with information that has already been mentioned earlier in a text. One aspect of this integration process involves anaphoric resolution, whereby co-referentiality occurs when an anaphoric item (e.g. a pronoun, determiner or noun phrase) is linked with an already given antecedent in the text. Successful anaphoric resolution is typically associated with skilled readers/comprehenders. This paper reports on findings from a study that investigated anaphoric resolution by ESL students during the reading of expository texts used at first-year level. Linguistic and textual factors such as type and inference strength of anaphoric tie were taken into account to test for differential processing effects. The relationship between skill in anaphoric resolution and academic performance is explored, and the implications of these findings are discussed.