Comprehension levels and their relation to the predominance of semiotic systems: an overview to multimodal comprehension from the point of view of academic discourse

Abstract

This research aims to determine the level of comprehension that university students achieve in a Pedagogy in Spanish degree program when they are faced with reading texts from the area of linguistics which demonstrate the predominance of different semiotic systems. To achieve this goal, two comprehension tests were designed, one with a predominance of the verbal semiotic system and another with a predominance of the graphic system, which, after being validated and piloted, were applied to 60 university students of the aforementioned program. Based on van Dijk & Kintsch’s model and Schnotz's multimodal comprehension model, both tests aim to measure comprehension at different levels (van Dijk & Kintsch 1983; Schnotz 2005). The results show that the predominance of different semiotic systems in the reading of texts in the area of linguistics does not significantly influence the levels of achievement.