"Man väljer ett svarsalternativ som man inte tagit så många gånger"

En studie över hur ordförståelse och kontext påverkar gymnasieelevers läsförståelse

Författare

Marina Hansson

Summary, in English

As inhabitants of one of the most literate countries in the world, the Swedes encounter a variety of different texts throughout their days and lives. When many of these texts contain difficult words, one begins to wonder whether a glossary or similar would benefit the readers, or if the given context is enough for the readers to understand the text.

For this essay, I created an experiment in the shape of a reading comprehension test. The informants were students from the second and third year in a Swedish high school, and my purpose was to examine whether there was any difference in performance between a group that had access to a glossary while performing the test, and a group that did not have access to any other resources than the context when performing the test.

The results did not show a significant difference between the two groups, but might instead have indicated that the group without the glossary in general performed better than the group with the glossary.

Because of the design and method of this experiment, it is hard to draw any conclusions about what these results say regarding how different groups of people would perform when reading a real text from an authority or organization. The placement, disposition and style of the glossary might have played a bigger part than expected, and there are many more exciting areas within this field to be examined. Until then, I support the recommendation from Myndigheternas skrivregler (2014:21), that glossaries should be used when a text contains difficult words and words that the targeted reader is not familiar with.

Avdelning/ar