Abstract:

Text comprehension is one of the most important educational tasks nowadays. The most critical part of the learning process is the ability to properly perceive, transform and, finally, comprehend what is read. Until now, little research has been done on the evaluation of aspects involved in the process of comprehension. The successful text comprehension and remembering of written information depends on the ability to access to and later integrate basic knowledge, and also on the ability to create, keep and update the iterative forms if knowledge constructions. The aim of our work was to show, that a successful comprehension and keeping of text, that was read, depends also on the ability to form, reliably open and integrate cognitive values and semantic structures, which affect on all the system of values and motives of a human, including the activity of comprehension in the process of reading. For that, the present article contains our development of one such model (Perfetti, Landi & Oakhill’s, 2005), which, to our opinion, is mostly precise in showing of dynamics of levelled comprehension process. The experiments, conducted by us, used passages, that we had created. The experimental passages exemplify a class of simple narrative stories that is described by a generative grammar of plot structures. Each row of such passages was dedicated to one of value-semantic construct (rows of 4 - 5 passages were used) The examples of such constructs, used in our experiments, were: «Conflict solving», «Collective help», «Social justice». The propositional analysis of a discourse had shown, that a reader may activate the schemes just at the start of reading process. Within the gathering of new information, a reader compares and evaluates main aspects, and, at last, integrates his own updated representation into a complex scheme in long time memory. The use of the comprehension model in the process of education is discussed in the present article.

Keywords:

Text comprehension, cognitive values and semantic structures, comprehension model, levelled comprehension process, propositional analysis.