MODELS OF FOREIGN TEXT UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

The article aims: 1) to analyze the theoretical development of models for understanding a foreign language text from a psychological point of view; 2) to emphasize their contribution to the general theory of understanding; 3) to structure, single out models of comprehension of a foreign language text. It also considers psycholinguistic and cognitive processes that affect the reader’s understanding of a foreign language text, analyzes resonant, constructivist and dynamic approaches to the processes of decoding lexical and grammatical information and inference of the meaning of the text. The main idea of the resonant approach is that in the process of reading, the reader automatically activates and removes from long-term memory all the information that corresponds to the semantic and phonological material of the text. The constructivist approach assumes that text comprehension is based on cognitively processed meanings of lexical units, which are always constructed in working memory depending on the content of the context and verbal/nonverbal experience of the reader. Currently, a dynamic approach to modelling the foreign text comprehension dominates, in which the resonant process and construction are considered to interact on a stage basis: the initial broad activation of lexical and grammatical concepts is accompanied by cognitive processing and extraction of relevant meanings from different knowledge structures in the long run. Thus, all these processes actively interact with the individual cognitive base of the reader, which does not lead to the creation of a literal, but to a more complex mental representation of a foreign text. The created representation depends not only on the previous knowledge of the reader, but also enriches his frames, which contain information about the typical and the possible in relevant situations.