Speaker
Description
Text comprehension is one of the most influential aspects of academic performance, particularly problematic for students coming from another culture. To read is an ecological training to improve the comprehension, but finding books that are both interesting and understandable by preadolescents and adolescents learning Italian as their L2 language is a challenge. The AKA Books Project objective is to offer books that are both engaging and capable of aiding comprehension, by editing the text or adding graphics to enhance the clarity of important aspects.
To evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies implemented by the AKA project we used the MT Tests in the school version (Cornoldi, Colpo, and Carretti, 2017) to assess text understanding. We involved 50 pupils attending the eighth grade. Each participant takes two different text comprehension tasks, one with the Italian standardized material and the other with the same material facilitated according to AKA procedures. By means of a 2x2 factorial design, we randomized separately for males and females the test version (standard or facilitated test first) and the type of test (final task for seventh grade o initial task for eight grade first). We utilized non-parametric exact tests to compare the means of AKA and standard version.
As expected, we found a significant difference in comprehension only for L2 speakers (Mann-Whitney Exact Test, Two-tailed, Monte Carlo Method: U=11.000, p=.056, d=1.000), performing better in the AKA version of the test.
The effectiveness of AKA version is an important result both for research and educational projects.
