Abstract
The present study investigated the effects of three types of questions—fact-finding questions (FFQ), backward inference questions (BIQ), and self-reference questions (SRQ)—on learners’ construction of situation models during reading instruction in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) environment. In this experiment, 89 Japanese high-school students read two passages with different text levels, and their comprehension and construction of situation models were assessed via a free recall task (FRT) and a sentence recognition task (SRT). For FRT, the recall data was analyzed qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The results indicated that the participants in the upper group did not generate inferences without questions in the difficult text, but they generated them without questions in the easy text. However, participants given SRQ in the upper group generated inferences even in the difficult text. On the other hand, FFQ and BIQ did not activate the generation of inferences by the participants in the upper group in the difficult text. In addition, we found that there is a possibility that questions would sometimes interfere with the generation of inferences as well as surface-level comprehension in the easy text in the upper group. The results also indicated that the generation of inferences was not activated for the participants in the lower group without questions, but inferences were generated if they were given SRQ.
