Supporting the Maintenance of Global Coherence With Situational Instruction

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Other Title
  • Supporting the Maintenance of Global Coherence With Situational Instruction : Evidence From Eye Movements During EFL Reading
  • Evidence From Eye Movements During EFL Reading

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Description

An eye-tracking experiment examined whether and how situational instruction that directs readers to mentally visualize texts supports EFL readers’ maintenance of global coherence during reading. A total of 49 Japanese university students read narrative texts containing character traits (e.g., junk food lover/vegetarian) that were either consistent or inconsistent with character actions (e.g., ordering a cheeseburger) in target sentences presented later in the texts. They were instructed first to read for understanding and next to mentally visualize the texts in order to understand the situations in the texts while their eye movements were recorded. The results showed that readers paid more attention to character information when reading under the situational instruction, which consequently led to the construction of elaborated situational mental representations. Due to such increased attention and enriched situation models of character information, the situational instruction led readers to detect global inconsistencies in texts. In contrast, global inconsistencies did not affect look backs into distant prior information. Taken together, these findings confirm that the situational instruction is an effective way of promoting EFL readers’ situation-model construction and maintenance of global coherence.

Journal

  • JACET Journal

    JACET Journal 61 (0), 89-107, 2017

    The Japan Association of College English Teachers

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