Effects of "Intrusion of Thoughts" on the Formation of Inappropriate Reading Representations: Reading an Explanatory Text

Abstract

The present authors (Kudo & Masuda, 2013; in Japanese) suggested that readers' thoughts that were inspired by text content intruding into their reading representations, that is, "intrusion of thoughts", may be a factor that could lead to inappropriate reading representations. The phenomenon was observed in a qualitative study by the first author (Masuda, 2018; in Japanese). The present research, which was intended to examine this hypothesis further, was a quantitative analysis of the relationship between intrusion of thoughts and inappropriate reading. In Study 1, university students (N= 96) were asked to read an explanatory text, describe the important and interesting parts of the text, and write a summary of its purpose. The results indicated that the students whose responses were evaluated as appropriate were likely to rely on the parts of the text that they had judged to be important, whereas students whose responses were evaluated as inappropriate were likely to rely on the parts of the text that they had reported were interesting. The data also suggested that many intrusions were related to the beginning and end of the text. Therefore, in Study 2, university students (N= 94) were asked to read the same text, but in which the last paragraph had been replaced. The results showed increases in intrusions that were related to the contents of the last paragraph. The results are discussed in terms of the misapplication of top-down reading strategies