Effects of Flashback on Japanese EFL Readers' Narrative Comprehension

DOI

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • フラッシュバックが日本人EFL学習者の物語文理解に与える影響

Abstract

This study investigated how a flashback in a passage affects Japanese EFL readers' narrative comprehension. The order of events written in a narrative story is sometimes different from that in the real world; thus, readers need additional processes which fill in the gap between the linguistic description of the event order and the event order in their mind. In the present study, 37 Japanese university students read a narrative text written in chronological order, and another 37 students read the same text written in non-chronological order. In the latter version, the first event (E) was put into the third position (E2→E3→E1→E4). That is, E1 was presented as a flashback. An immediate and a delayed recall test revealed that the participants who read the chronological text successfully recalled more information than those who read the non-chronological text, which was also supported by the participants' evaluation of text difficulty. In addition, the error analysis showed that both local and global errors increased when participants read the non-chronological text. Furthermore, more proficient readers were able to arrange the text information in chronological order in their mental representations even when they read the flashback text. Although the flashback did increase the cognitive demand on readers, these readers could follow the events in chronological order, and successfully corrected their situation model.

Journal

Details 詳細情報について

  • CRID
    1390001205823739136
  • NII Article ID
    110009425251
  • DOI
    10.20581/arele.22.0_111
  • ISSN
    24320412
    13448560
  • Text Lang
    en
  • Data Source
    • JaLC
    • CiNii Articles
  • Abstract License Flag
    Disallowed

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