Discourse Processing Strategies and Reading
Keywords:
reading comprehension, discourse processing, recall strategies, schema theoryAbstract
Research on text organization has demonstrated that reading is responsive to the number and complexity of idea units or propositions in a text and that the capacity of children to recall information is responsive to the relative importance of the idea units. This paper examines an extension of these propositions, namely, that reading is responsive to the reader’s capacity for text recall. Earlier research suggested that the type of recall used by the reader would give insight into the manner in which a reader obtains meaning from print. The study supported this thesis. Readers using text-entailed recall strategies gained the most insight into the meaning of text. On the other hand, the more text-erroneous information that a reader gave, the less the reader comprehended text. Text-specific recalls were of marginal significance while the impact of text-external and text-experiential recalls on reading was negligible. The recall model proved a powerful predictor of reading comprehension, which suggests that recall ability is an important encoding strategy for readers in gaining meaning.
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