Acceso usuarios
Jorge Alberto Sánchez, Gisela Müller
This study investigates the textual comprehension of the discourse genre abstract of empirical social sciences articles in English within an extracurricular module entitled Academic Literacy with students of Social Communication (SC) and Social Work (SW) majors from a public university in Argentina. A variety of multiple-choice questions in each task was included for the pre- and post-tests as well as for the presentation and practice stages. These tasks were systematically and empirically evaluated under the genre-based approach to make students aware of the importance of understanding the rhetorical information and the communicative functions of the lexico-grammatical elements of the discourse genre abstract. Students’ answers in the pre- and post-tests were analyzed and contrasted, thus yielding data on their textual comprehension performance of the genre. Findings indicated that both groups experienced difficulties in the strategy detailed reading, though most students were able to identify the lexico-grammatical elements of the genre in both tests. In the pre-test, SC and SW students had limitations to correlate these elements with their communicative functions and the rhetorical moves. It is concluded that more exposure to the proposed tasks is necessary to improve students’ performance in the textual comprehension of the discourse genre abstract.
