Abstract
This study examined the effects of strategy instructions on Japanese EFL learners’ thematic inference and cognitive resource allocation during reading. To facilitate the construction of global coherence of mental representations, the present study gave strategy instructions aimed at thematic inference, which is defined as understanding implicit points, messages, or morals in narrative stories. Japanese university students were asked first to read two short narrative passages for understanding, and then to read two other passages to generate thematic inferences. The learners’ cognitive resource allocation during reading was measured by a think-aloud method and a short questionnaire. The results demonstrated that the strategy instructions facilitated learners’ thematic inference generation and helped learners to distribute cognitive resources from lower-level processing, such as word and sentence analysis, to paraphrasing. In contrast, although the strategy instructions induced learners to set higher standards of coherence, their ability to allocate their cognitive resources to other kinds of inference can be related to learners’ English reading proficiency
