The Effects Of Self-explaining And Language Working Memory On Chinese Discourse Comprehension

Self-explaining refers to the process of explaining learning materials on hand to oneself. Plenty of researches overseas which related self-explaining to discourse comprehension showed that self-explaining helped learners improve their understanding to complex texts. But there were scarce studies investigated the effects of self-explaining on Chinese discourse comprehension. Furthermore, none of the studies hitherto examined the relationship between self-explaing and working memory.With between-subject design and Chinese science explanatory texts as reading materials, this study was to examine the influence of self-explaining and language working memory on discourse comprehension and the influence of language working memory on self-explaining itself.According to the findings of this study, we drew conclusions as follows:(1) Self-explaining activities facilitated participants'understanding to the texts.(2) High language working memory capacity demonstrated improvements in discourse comprehension.(3) There were no significant interaction between yes/no self-explaning reading condition and language working memory capacity. Thus, participants benefitted from self-explaining activities while reading regardless of their language working memory capacity.(4) Those participants with higher language working memory capacity generated more self-explanations and used more connectings and reasonings while reading than those participants with lower language working memory capacity.