The role of knowledge of connectives in comprehension of a German narrative text

Background Connectives, such as because or although, explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students with high metacognitive knowledge. The present study assessed the applicability of these findings to German narrative texts. Methods Structural equation modelling was performed on a study of 456 ninth graders. Tasks mainly consisted of standardised tests. Results Controlling for general vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency and knowledge of reading strategies, knowledge of connectives significantly and positively related to text comprehension for monolingual students, whereas there was no significant effect for bilinguals. Knowledge of connectives did not interact with knowledge of reading strategies. Conclusions It may be beneficial to teach deep knowledge of connectives, in combination with further language knowledge essential to understand individual elements of a text, for example, vocabulary.