markhu26
How to understand "instrumentalist hypothesis" in the following sentence? Baumann et. al.(2002, p. 155), state that the assertion that there is a causal relationship between vocabulary and comprehension has been referred to as the “instrumentalist hypothesis, which claims that vocabulary knowledge is directly and importantly in the causal chain resulting in text comprehension.”
Sep 2, 2014 7:52 AM
Answers · 3
1
This is a technical term for the idea that “proposes that the presence or absence of vocabulary knowledge causes or hampers reading comprehension. This hypothesis suggests that teaching word meanings would directly improve comprehension, as would mechanical substitutions of known words for unknown ones.” Basically it's just saying that knowing the meaning of more words improves your reading.
September 2, 2014
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