Abstract
This study examined the effects of task instructions for facilitating the construction of global coherence in the text, focusing on learners' processes and products of reading comprehension. A total of 23 Japanese university students read two expository texts in both (a) the control condition (read a text freely) and (b) the task condition (read a text in order to answer the theme of the overall text). They spoke their thoughts aloud as they read and later recalled the text. The results showed that the effects of the task instructions did not appear in learners' processes during reading. On the other hand, the task instructions facilitated the learners' text comprehension after reading. Moreover, the relationships between processes and products changed according to the task instructions. These results indicated that EFL learners had difficulty changing their reading processes according to given instructions; however, they constructed coherent text representations through engaging in the given task, and this consequently led to better text comprehension.
