The_effects_of_headlines_and_summaries_on_news_comprehension_and_recall.docx
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1、Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9: 85106, 1997. 85 c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. The effects of headlines and summaries on news comprehension and recall JOSE A. LEO N Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain Abstract. In two experiments, we attempted t
2、o analyze the effects of newspaper article head- lines and summaries on final comprehension and recall. During the first experiment, the participants consisted of 117 high school students from the 9th grade, 68 from the 11th grade, 79 first year Psychology students from the Autonoma University of Ma
3、drid and 66 fifth year Journalism students from the Complutense University of Madrid. The subjects were randomly required to read a news report in one of the following experimental conditions: (1) the whole news article (headline, summary and text), (2) the headline and text, (3) the summary and tex
4、t, and (4), the text only. The data from immediate and delayed free recall tasks were recorded. The results showed that the structure of the news article did not influence the recall and that there were differences among groups in the amount and quality of recall. The headline and the summary modifi
5、ed by the use of macrostructural criteria constituted additional elements introduced into the second experiment to provide a contrast with the original headline and summary. The results showed that an improvement in article recall did occur with the modified version in comparison with the original v
6、ersion. These two experiments have confirmed that the aims and criteria of journalists differ from those held by the authors of scientific texts and question whether the reading strategies applied are the same in both cases. Key words: Headline, Summary, News article comprehension and recall, News a
7、rticle structure, Text comprehension, Young readers Introduction The press is one of the most important forms of expression available. In the last few years, emphasis has been put on the need to incorporate newspapers into education as an instrument for transmitting knowledge and as a means of estab
8、lishing significant links between pupils and society. Ultimately, it is reasonable to maintain that one of the central aims of any educational system is to produce citizens capable of understanding aspects of the world around them. However, in spite of this laudable aim, hardly any fundamental links
9、 have been set up between the cognitive investigation of text comprehension and didactic experience with text books in schools. There has been only limited interest in an area that we consider to be essential: the way that readers understand and recall newspaper articles and how text variables influ
10、ence readers comprehension of the articles. 86 JOSE A. LEO N Cognitive psychological research has provided an increasingly precise understanding of the factors that influence the comprehension of written material, such as its structure or the role played by summaries and titles. These aspects have b
11、een widely researched in academic and scientific texts. One of the areas of text comprehension investigation which has most inter- ested psychologists and researchers concerns the processes that occur during the comprehension and summarising phases. A generally acknowledged tendency consists of habi
12、tually using the summary in order to emphasize and organize the most relevant contents of the text. Although the summary concept is imprecise, the summaries themselves hold a significant place in scientific texts while their effectiveness in improving comprehension and recall is generally recognised
13、 (Hartley & Trueman 1983). So, when we compre- hend a passage, we tend to form a nucleus of information, a core concept which represents a general vision of the text. This core information forms the macrostructure. Although there exist several theories concerning the inter- pretation of the effects
14、associated with the improvement in comprehension and recall brought about by the initial summary, perhaps the macrostructural version put forward by Kinstch & van Dijk (1978; van Dijk & Kinstch 1983) is the most widely accepted. According to this theory, the initial summary assists the memory by ope
15、rating like a retrieval programme. In this way, the summary helps to create a concise, organized mental representation of the text. This theory states that the correct processing of a summary has at least two positive effects on the memory. On the one hand, it tends to reduce the information storage
16、 of the text macropropositions expressed in the summary. On the other hand, the retrieval is made easier by the integrated structure of the macropropositions already stored. The storage and retrieval of the macropropositional contents will certainly be more enhanced than those of the micropropositio
17、nal contents, the latter being identified with information relating to detail. These macrostructural mechanisms can also be applied to the study of titles. A significant number of theoretical and empirical works suggest that the introduction of well-written headlines or headings equally promotes bot
18、h the comprehension and the correct processing of written information. Some good examples of this type of work can be found in articles from the seventies, such as the significant contributions made by Bransford & Johnson (1972), Anderson & Pichert (1978) or Glynn (1978). More recently, the most pro
19、minent works have been published by Loman & Mayer (1983), Lorch & Lorch (1986, 1996), Spyridakis & Standal (1987), Whilhite (1988, 1989), Lorch (1989), Leon & Carretero (1992, 1995), and Grant (1993). Admittedly, the majority of these works apply to expository texts whose titles are to be interprete
20、d as words or sentences pointing out the relevant 87 THE EFFECTS OF HEADLINES AND NEWS SUMMARIES information to be covered in the text. A common feature of all these studies is the use of titles whose brief contents represent the essential macrostructural information. Several ways in which titles ca
21、n make text processing easier have been identified. One of these, perhaps the most important, is to activate the necessary mental scheme(s) in order to understand what has been read and, in this way, to direct the readers previous knowledge (Whilhite 1988, 1989). This is true to such an extent that,
22、 for some researchers, it is essential to read the title before the written contents so as to understand the text (Grant 1993; Leon & Martn 1993). Another theory, related to the previous idea, is that the title accentuates the links between concepts (Kozminski 1977; Leon & Carretero 1992). A third t
23、heory, more associated with the memory, is that the title provides a core content which promotes the retrieval of the information that it represents (Brooks et al. 1983; Hartley & Trueman 1983; Leon & Carretero 1995). Moreover, the title can provide additional interest and greater motivation to read
24、 texts which are especially long and difficult to understand (Hvistendahl 1968). On the other hand, some research has been carried out concerning the effects of the factors just described on the comprehension and recall of news- paper articles. In some cases, this research has been aimed at comparin
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