Primary students’ empathic text comprehension and transportation and their relations to childrens’ personal and motivational characteristics and text presentation types

Abstract

Teaching reading and skills of empathic text comprehension which are considered as a base to improve reading motivation, habits and reading skills are central goals of primary school education. To date, little is known about primary students’ empathic text comprehension, its relation to motivational characteristics and ways of promoting it. Therefore, the study focuses on questions regarding empathic text comprehension and transportation of primary students and their correlation with motivational characteristics (reading motivation, reading habits, reading for pleasure). Additionally, the extent to which these skills differ depending on the students’ entry requirements (age, grade, gender, language background) and forms of text presentation (with versus without illustrations) is examined. Therefore, in a quasi-experimental study, primary students (N = 105; grades 3 and 4) answered questionnaires about their socio-demographic and motivational characteristics and about the content of a story that was presented before in a reading with or without illustrations. The results provide insights into the transportation and empathic text comprehension skills of primary students. They show that these skills predominantly correlate positively with motivational student characteristics and vary depending on the students’ school grade level. Moreover, the outcomes raise questions about possible influencing factors, e.g., prior emotional knowledge, and the underlying processes of the skills examined. Investigating these in future studies can be expected to provide deeper insights into the skills involved in understanding literary texts and their importance for the development of reading motivation and reading literacy, which finally offer further starting points for reading promotion at primary school age.