Margaret S. Steffensen

A cross-cultural perspective on reading comprehension

SUBJECTS FROM THE UNITED STATES and India read letters about an Indian and an American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. Subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passage, and produced more culturally based distortions of the foreign passage. Whether recalling the native or foreign passage, subjects recalled more of the text elements rated as important by other subjects with the same cultural heritage. The results were interpreted as showing the pervasive influence on comprehension and memory of schemata embodying knowledge of the content of a discourse.

Black English Vernacular and Reading Comprehension: A Cloze Study of Third, Sixth, and Ninth Graders

This study was concerned with the reading comprehension of speakers of Black English Vernacular (BEV). Third, sixth, and ninth graders were rated as BEV or Standard English (SE) speakers using a sentence repetition task. They were then asked to complete passages which had been clozed for content words and verbs in the past and present tenses. This task used a multiple-choice format: Verb distractors were other forms of the clozed verb; content word distractors were words that were anomalous in that context. In a second task, subjects supplied time adverbials for 15 short paragraphs written in the past, present, or future tenses. On the cloze task, BEV speakers had significantly more errors for verbs than for content words compared to SE speakers. They also had significantly more errors in selecting the appropriate time adverbial on the basis of tense. These findings can be attributed to differences that exist in the verbal systems of SE and BEV.

The effect of situation on verbalization: A study of black inner‐city children∗

In this study the speech situation was varied to encourage the verbalization of black inner‐city children. Subjects were asked to identify items from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test in either a test situation (looking at the stimulus jointly with the experimenter) or a “need‐to‐know” situation (looking at the stimulus alone). It was predicted that subjects would give longer, more linguistically adequate responses in the need‐to‐know condition than in the test condition. Results supported this hypothesis. Subjects in the need‐to‐know condition produced more words and utterances than did subjects in the test condition, as well as more well‐formed short answers and full‐sentence responses. They also directed more non‐task‐related verbalizations to the experimenter. An unexpected finding was that these subjects also produced more accurate responses. Test‐condition subjects produced more responses that were highly elliptical, that altered the tense of the main verb, or that used pronouns without prior refe...