2012 Volume 23 Pages 105-120
The present study examined how Japanese EFL readers revise their situation models, focusing on two factors: (a) learners' reading sub-skills, and (b) the causal structures of stories. A total of 76 Japanese undergraduates read stories which required them to revise their interpretation of the stories during reading (i.e., situation model revision), then they performed sentence verification and recall tasks. The readers' success with the situation model revision was assessed using the combined data on those tasks. The results showed that reading skills needed for successful revision can be explained by the two textual factors specified by causal network analysis: the explicitness of the revision clues (± explicitness) and the complexity of the causal structures in each text (± simplicity). Specifically, higher level reading processing (e.g., making inferences) was needed for readers to revise their situation models when they read a story which did not include explicit revision clues (i.e., - explicitness), whereas lower level processing (e.g., paraphrasing) was needed when reading a story with a complicated causal structure (i.e., - simplicity). It is suggested that teachers should carefully take into account students' reading sub-skills and the causal structure of a text when requiring them to flexibly interpret the text.