再話による口頭説明が大局的一貫性の構築に及ぼす影響

抄録

Previously, retelling has been shown to improve readers' text understanding. This study extends that finding, showing that retelling contributes to Japanese EFL learners' reading comprehension by achieving global coherence. Thirty four Japanese EFL learners were asked to retell after reading a text. All of the participants took part in both the with- and without-retelling conditions, and were tested for their text comprehension. Regardless of learners' reading proficiency levels, the results demonstrate that readers in the with-retelling condition gained higher comprehension scores than those in the without-retelling condition. Moreover, the retelling effect was enormous when the given text had a weak global coherence. These results indicate that retelling promotes L2 reader's achieving global coherence. Furthermore, an investigation using questionnaire revealed that retelling prompted L2 learners to evaluate their own comprehension more strictly than the read-only condition. This strict evaluation by readers in the retelling condition is considered as reason for the gains in deeper understanding.