Learning and Comprehension of Text

Originally published in 1984, Learning and Comprehension of Text was the outcome of a conference held in West Germany in 1981. The main goal of the conference was to promote scientific exchange between educators, cognitive scientists, linguists, and psychologists who were investigating the acquisition of information from written forms of discourse. A second goal was to promote communication about such work between German and American investigators.

The chapters are arranged into three main sections. The first part includes chapters that examine some aspect of text structure or knowledge, which has been acquired about the text. Here studies are reported on how different organizations of a text affect how and what people read and remember. Also, an analysis is proposed to illustrate how a listener or reader might construct a coherent representation of a text and what types of knowledge a reader or listener acquires and uses to define a particular genre of discourse. In the second part, the chapters deal directly with the topic of learning from text. Learning is variously interpreted as change that occurs as a result of a system of processes, as a result of using one’s prior knowledge about a specific domain, and as a result of using one’s metacognitive knowledge about oneself as a learner of strategic skills. Also discussed is learning in the context of acquiring knowledge through training procedures for comprehending a text, including evaluative criteria for whether training is effective, especially where the learner is less skilled as a reader. In part three, the main themes are strategic skills and their effects on the processing of text. Various measure of such skills are explored via the use of eye-movement analysis, via inferences made during reading per se, or during active processing of connected discourse, as a result of questioning following the reading of text or by the limitations imposed by one’s information processing capacity. Today it can be read in its historical context.