抄録
Retelling activities in reading classes are widely recognized as means of helping learners construct richer mental representations of written texts. However, it remains uncertain whether teachers should routinely require students to recall the whole story. This study examined the effects of recalling sentence-level local content on text interpretation. A total of 123 undergraduates studying English as a foreign language were randomly assigned to two groups. Both groups participated in an online lesson that included vocabulary learning, oral introduction, comprehension, elaborative questions, and summarization. Before summarizing in their first language (Japanese), the experimental group (n = 47) was instructed to recall the contexts of three key content words from the reading material (i.e., context retrieval), whereas this step was omitted for the control group (n = 53). The findings reveal that the experimental treatment improved text interpretations among higher proficiency learners: The context-retrieval instruction prompted summaries that provided more elaborate explanations of the interrelationship between the first and latter sections of the passage. This type of instruction is now believed to enhance understanding of reading material and to support the retention of newly learned vocabulary (Hasegawa, 2021), particularly for intermediate-level English learners.
https://ror.org/05bx1gz93 
