SALTeL Journal (Southeast Asia Language Teaching and Learning)
Vol. 6 No. 2: July 2023

Text and Instruction Necessary for the Facilitation of EFL Reader’s Predictive Inference Generation

Masahiro MAEDA (Kanazawa Seiryo University, Japan & University of Tsukuba, Japan)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Jul 2023

Abstract

Inference generation is necessary for reading to understand stories. However, it may be difficult for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) readers to generate inferences owing to their limited cognitive resources that are mostly used in lower-level processing such as lexical and syntactical analysis. Predictive inference, which facilitates readers’ context processing and construction of a situational model, can be challenging for EFL readers to produce during reading. This study focuses on textual conditions and teacher’s task instructions to suggest the appropriate text choices and task instructions to help EFL readers produce predictive inferences. Two story versions (High-predictability Target vs. Control) and two different instructions (Predict the end of the story vs. Memorize the names of characters) were compared using recall rates. The findings indicated that the combination of a high-predictability target story with instructions to predict the end of the story would be the most effective pair for predictive inference.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

SALTeL

Publisher

Subject

Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media

Description

Southeast Asia Language Teaching and Learning (SALTeL) is a double-blind peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to promoting scholarly exchange among teachers and researchers in the field of Language Teaching. The journal is published online twice a year. The scope of SALTeL includes the ...