It helps a reader better understand a text by relating the text to real-life experiences.
Explanation:
When we're reading a text, we use our prior knowledge and experiences to understand it better and with more ease. There are different kinds of connections we can establish with a text:
Text-to-self - personal connections that a reader makes between a text and their own experiences.
Text-to-text - connections that a reader makes between the text they are reading now and previously read texts.
Text-to-world - connections that the reader makes between the text and more universal, non-personal experiences (e.g. what we can see on TV).
What's described in your question is are text-to-self connections. Thus, the correct option is the second one.
