Education Based on the Cognitive Process of Understanding and Producing Texts

In Conjunction with an Experiment in Reading and Composition for Communication

Abstract

In order to improve education it is essential to understand the psychology of learners. Psychology has a cognitive as well as an affective side, and it is important to provide a foundation in the learner's internal cognitive processes. I give an overview of various psychological studies, showing how the process of understanding and producing texts beyond the level of single sentences is a process of forming an overall cohesive and consistent representation that, in addition to the understanding of words and sentences, involves knowledge-based inference. Further I show how an integrated experiment in which texts are produced and read with the aim of interpersonal communication promotes the construction and production of situational models that infer the assumed interlocutor's understanding, and discuss what this implies for empirical research and Japanese Language Education. Referring to psychological studies in Teaching Japanese as a Second Language, I express the wish for the development of education based on cognitive processes.