This study investigated how a flashback in a passage affects Japanese EFL readers' narrative comprehension. The order of events written in a narrative story is sometimes different from that in the real world; thus, readers need additional processes which fill in the gap between the linguistic description of the event order and the event order in their mind. In the present study, 37 Japanese university students read a narrative text written in chronological order, and another 37 students read the same text written in non-chronological order. In the latter version, the first event (E) was put into the third position (E2→E3→E1→E4). That is, E1 was presented as a flashback. An immediate and a delayed recall test revealed that the participants who read the chronological text successfully recalled more information than those who read the non-chronological text, which was also supported by the participants' evaluation of text difficulty. In addition, the error analysis showed that both local and global errors increased when participants read the non-chronological text. Furthermore, more proficient readers were able to arrange the text information in chronological order in their mental representations even when they read the flashback text. Although the flashback did increase the cognitive demand on readers, these readers could follow the events in chronological order, and successfully corrected their situation model.
