A Two-Step Approach to Measuring the Effects of Retelling on Mental Representations in Japanese EFL Learners: An Analysis Using Sentence Recognition Tasks

Abstract

This study proposes a better usage of sentence recognition tasks to measure the effects of retelling on the textbase and situation-model representations of Japanese learners of English as a foreign language. The effects of retelling were analyzed from two perspectives: Does retelling reinforce the memory of textual information and help construct a more elaborate situation model? Does retelling improve sensitivity to identifying any contradictory information at the textbase or situation-model levels? The participants’ memories were analyzed using the recognition confidence ratings of the test items (paraphrases, inferences, and distractors). A total of 25 Japanese students from the National Institute of Technology participated in the experiment. All participants read one experimental text and answered sentence recognition tasks. Subsequently, they read the other text and retold the story in Japanese before taking on the sentence recognition task. The learners’ mental representations were analyzed in two steps. First, recognition confidence ratings for paraphrases and inferences were analyzed as the strengths of the textbase and situation-model representations, respectively. Second, the difference values were analyzed as the sensitivity to identifying contradictory information at each level of understanding. The results suggested that retelling significantly strengthened the memory of information at the textbase level and led to a more elaborate situation model. The results further demonstrated that retelling significantly improved the sensitivity to detecting contradictory information at the situation-model level. These findings underscore the efficacy of using a two-step sentence recognition task to precisely elucidate the effects of retelling on reading comprehension.