Strategies for Understanding Information Organization in Discourse

摘要

The strategies of native and non-native English speakers reading informational texts were examined. The texts differed in the degree to which information was explicitly signalled by rhetorical devices such as first, second, and third. Students read a series of passages presented on a microcomputer, one sentence at a time. From traces of students' progress through the text, including time and the sequence in which sentences were read, we categorized each passage in terms of three Global Strategy types and ten local, backtracking strategies. All individuals but one used multiple global and local strategies across the 8 packages they read. Although the signalling affected memory for the signalled information, strategies were not systematically related to this variable. Rather, when both native English and non-native English speakers were trying to understand these texts, they appeared to use a series of decision rules that encompass local and global, structural and semantic aspects of text. Suggestions are made regarding the nature of these decision rules and their implications for understanding text processing in complex content domains. (KR)