Research questions

Also at this stage of the study, Britton's grammar was applied to analyze students’ protocols and the texts. For each reader, the results of two analyses, that of the protocol and that of the text, were compared. This helped to show how each reader constructed his/her model of the text (i.e., what propositions he/she developed in his/her comprehension), drawing on the text clues. It was assumed that “[i]n the comprehension process, meaningful text units are transferred into propositions” (Louwerse and Graesser 2006: 427; see Part I, Chapter 3, Section 3.1.). In students’ comprehension, after Britton (1994), propositions were viewed as nodes – units of meaning that constitute the network of ideas developed by readers during the reading of the text. It is important to stress that at this stage of the study the term “proposition” is used both in the analysis of the text and the analysis of students’ protocols. It refers to text units (in the text analysis) and the ideas the students constructed on the basis of the text (in the analysis of TA protocols).

The main aim of this stage of analysis were to answer the following questions:

1. – How did the readers construct the models of each text?

2. – What propositions can be identified in the students’ representations of the texts?

This stage did not aim to find differences between students’ reading in Polish and their reading in English.