Revising Local Coherence of History Text to Improve Learning

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper was to propose a practical method of revising texts to enhance students' learning. The method used here was originated by Britton & Gülgöz (1991) and was translated to be more practical and applicable to Japanese texts. It was applied to revise part of the junior high school history texts so that the revised ones would be more locally coherent than the original ones. In the present experiment, either revised or original texts were assigned to 115 seventh grade students who had not learned its content. Their performance was measured in immediate and delayed conditions. The results showed that readers of the revised text performed better than those of the original one. Educational implications from this study were as follows: a) if students learned new things from texts, they would benefit more from ones with good local coherence (considerate texts) rather than inconsiderate ones; b) the method used here to revise a text for local coherence would be more practicable for an instructional text.