The cohesion and coherence of a text determines the ease with which a reader can bring background knowledge to bear.

– The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review

Expository texts, by contrast, involve abstract concepts, often having no plot or storyline, and the reader’s task is not to engage in mental simulation of events, but to identify the different possible relationships among the concepts

– From eye movements to scanpath networks: A method for studying individual differences in expository text reading

Primary school students are not tested as of yet on writing expository texts. An expository text differs from a narrative. The former is sometimes referred to as a factual text. Though students in primary school would be more familiar with narratives, they do require an understanding of what expository texts are, to do well in their exams.

Expository texts are written to give readers information on a particular topic. They could achieve the following purposes: justify a planned action in the case of a proposal, persuade readers to accept the writer’s position on an issue, communicate the writer’s point of view on a situation, place or person (English Language Syllabus 2010: Primary (Foundation) and Secondary (Express/Normal [Academic], MOE).

In primary school, students will need to comprehend expository writing in order to be able to answer questions. The comprehension cloze component is usually based on expository texts. Apart from this, students would also need to know how to understand expository texts to attempt the Grammar Cloze and Editing components of the Language Use component of English Exams (Paper 2).

There is a general observation among teachers that there may be a tendency (or temptation) for students to deal with Comprehension cloze, Grammar cloze and Editing at the sentence level rather than at the global level of the whole text.

Comprehension Cloze exercises are expository texts with words taken out. Students would need to understand meaning at the sentence, paragraph and text levels in order to answer correctly. Here, a correct answer will fit in to convey the intended meaning of the text. Students will be constrained in the range of words they can use as answers because answers will also have to fit grammatically.

Grammar Cloze exercises are like comprehension cloze exercises except the words to use are given and of a grammatical nature (such as prepositions, conjunctions and determiners). Even though the options are grammatical in nature, Grammar cloze is different from Grammar MCQ in a fundamental way. In Grammar MCQ, students can derive the complete meaning from one sentence alone whereas in Grammar cloze, sentences flow from one to another and are connected with each other in order to convey meaning. Students would therefore need to understand the connections between sentences in order to answer correctly. Also, when read only at the sentence level, there may be more than one option which seems like the correct answer and it is only when subsequent sentences are read that the correct option will become clear.

Editing exercises may at first glance appear to be straightforward requirements to correct spelling and grammar. However, without understanding how sentences and paragraphs are connected to one another, it will be difficult to decide which grammatical version is required in the case of grammar errors. In the case of spelling errors, there would be occasions when students are unable to recognise the word which is required because they do not recognise the word in its misspelled form. In such instances, without understanding the overall meaning beyond the sentence level, students would find it difficult to know the correct answer.

So, the first thing to note is that Comprehension Cloze, Grammar Cloze and Editing exercises require students to recognise that meaning comes from a collection of sentences and not from one sentence alone. Recognising connections would require not only reading comprehension skills such as decoding – the ability to recognize individual written words (Smith et al., 2021) and inference – when a student can take their prior knowledge and applies it to the text that they are reading (Will, 2018) but also background knowledge (Smith et al. 2021).

Smith and colleagues conducted a critical review of academic studies published over 70 years, beginning in the 1950s. After arriving at a long list of 9651 such studies, they shortlisted 158 based on their eligibility criteria (studies on the effect of background knowledge on reading comprehension of primary school students who are typical performers and who were not learning English as a second language). They read the 158 papers and then selected their final 18 and another 5 by going through the reference list of some of the initially selected papers. The final selection of 23 studies all measured initial background knowledge or tested some background knowledge building procedure. Students in these 23 studies were then tested on their reading comprehension ability so that the effect of background knowledge could be measured.

Their review confirms that background knowledge on the topic which a passage is based on would boost reading comprehension scores. They also found that though both students who are considered proficient in comprehension and as developing, benefitted greatly from having background knowledge. Crucially they found evidence in the 23 studies that students who were not as proficient in decoding or other reading comprehension skills could still do well in comprehension exercises when they had background knowledge.

They explained how background knowledge contributes to enhanced comprehension ability by referring to theories of reading comprehension. There are two technical terms which feature in these theories. They are, textbase and situational model.

Textbase is a student’s understanding of the information conveyed by a text, directly and implicitly (requires the student to make inferences or read between the lines). Situational model is what the student makes of the text after applying background knowledge.

A resulting situational model could add on to a student’s background information. In this case, the student assesses what is read in the instant text as true according to everything else the student knows about the topic. The student would be able to recognise domain specific terms such as extinction (in the case of passages on animals). Reading and understanding would be much faster because the student could focus on the familiar domain specific words also known as topic words and they “skip” “irrelevant” words (Ma et al. 2021).

It could include the understanding that the writer of the article is in some way misinformed as to the facts. Here, the student would reject the view point or state of affairs put forth in the text.

Students with background knowledge are better at forming both the textbase and the situational model. An accurate situational model is required especially for inference. Comprehension cloze exercises often require inference – the process by which a reader integrates information from the text with background knowledge in order to fill in detail and links not explicitly stated in a text (Smith et al., 2021 as cited in McNamara & Magliano, 2009).

The foreground is not the whole picture.

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