Yuji Ushiro's research while affiliated with University of Tsukuba and other places
What is this page?
This page lists the scientific contributions of an author, who either does not have a ResearchGate profile, or has not yet added these contributions to their profile.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
It was automatically created by ResearchGate to create a record of this author's body of work. We create such pages to advance our goal of creating and maintaining the most comprehensive scientific repository possible. In doing so, we process publicly available (personal) data relating to the author as a member of the scientific community.
If you're a ResearchGate member, you can follow this page to keep up with this author's work.
If you are this author, and you don't want us to display this page anymore, please let us know.
Publications (18)
Abstract
This study investigated the monitoring of situational intersentential links in L2 narrative reading. Fifteen Japanese college students read English narrative texts including information inconsistent along three situational dimensions (protagonist, temporality, spatiality). Their during-reading processes were recorded with an eye tracker an...
Successful reading requires readers to understand the literal meaning of each sentence and the messages evoked from them (Kintsch, 1998). According to the event-indexing model (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998), narratives have several aspects of information, called dimensions (e.g., protagonist, causality, and intentionality), and readers understand senten...
This study explored how Japanese students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) understand the protagonist, causal, and intentional links between sentences during narrative reading employing an eye-tracking technique. Forty Japanese undergraduates read narrative texts, each of which contained a target sentence (e.g., Patricia ordered a cup o...
This study explored how Japanese students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) understand the protagonist, causal, and intentional links between sentences during narrative reading employing an eye-tracking technique. Forty Japanese undergraduates read narrative texts, each of which contained a target sentence (e.g., Patricia ordered a cup o...
Information in narrative texts is linked by different, multiple dimensions such as protagonist, causality, intentionality, spatiality, and temporality. However, little is known about how English as a foreign language (EFL) students understand different dimensions of narratives during reading. This study explored Japanese EFL students' understanding...
This study discusses the processes of reading in a second language that determine success in maintaining the coherence of narrative comprehension. In an experiment, Japanese university students thought aloud their cognitive processes when reading narratives, which included discrepancies between characters' traits and actions. Participants, first, r...
PURPOSE: We explored how well L2 readers monitor the coherence of three situational dimensions (protagonist identity, physical causality, and intentional causality) during narrative reading. It is widely assumed that L1 readers routinely monitor several situational dimensions as they proceed through texts (Zwaan & Radvansky, 1998). However, most of...
This study examined whether and how Japanese EFL readers maintain coherent narrative comprehension in their memory representations. If readers can successfully maintain coherence in their text comprehension despite encountering coherence breaks, their text memory is enhanced, but if they fail, their text memory can suffer (Otero & Kintsch, 1992). I...
An eye-tracking experiment examined whether and how situational instruction that directs readers to mentally visualize texts supports EFL readers' maintenance of global coherence during reading. A total of 49 Japanese university students read narrative texts containing character traits (e.g., junk food lover/vegetarian) that were either consistent...
This study involved two eye-tracking experiments that investigated whether and how Japanese EFL learners maintain coherent text comprehension (i.e., a situation model). The participants' eye movements were recorded while reading narratives each of which included an inconsistency between a description of a character (e.g., a vegetarian) and a subseq...
The present study describes the first step in the development and validation of a task-based reading performance test. We designed 6 information transfer task test items in which test-takers were required to transfer what they comprehended from passages (e.g., reading a travel schedule and communicating it to circle members via email). To validate...
This study examined whether (a) EFL learners can build a mental representation of an expository text that represents causal relations among text ideas and (b) building a causally coherent representation leads to learning from the text. In the experiment, three groups of Japanese university students at different English reading proficiency levels (i...
The summary writing task has been widely used in order to examine how well readers comprehend texts (Alderson, 2000). As a scoring criterion of summary protocols, previous studies have considered whether or not a reader can effectively use macrorules, which reflect the process of readers' construction of their mental representation (e.g., Johns & M...
The present study examined how Japanese EFL learners infer the meaning of unknown words from discourse information, focusing on their depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK) and availability of contextual cues for lexical inferencing. A total of 70 Japanese undergraduates performed a lexical inferencing task in a single sentence and a text (i.e., sente...
The relationship between reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge has been examined in many studies. However, few studies so far have distinguished the vocabulary knowledge in isolation and in context. Addressing this point, this study considered two types of vocabulary tests: Mochizuki (1998) Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and TOEFL vocabulary i...
Translation tests are widely used for high school term tests and entrance examinations as well as university entrance examinations. Although a considerable number of papers point out the possibility of low reliability for scoring, little is known about the factors raters play in the reliability of scoring (Watanabe, 1994). This study examines how t...
Citations
... On the other hand, how IC is used in second-language (L2) learners is largely unknown. Note that L2 learners are widely known to experience difficulty making connections between information in discourse (Horiba, 1996;Ushiro et al., 2016;Ushiro et al., 2017). However, causes of such difficulty are not well specified primarily because most of the past L2 studies have targeted largescale connections spanning multiple sentences, with word-level semantics (including IC) that build a basis for such inter-sentential connections being little addressed (see Cheng & Almor, 2017, for an exception). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/1166065426014208-1655023070381_Q64/Masaya-Hosoda.jpg)
... Previous studies have investigated the characteristics of distractors in reading comprehension items (e.g., Drum et al., 1981;Freedle & Kostin, 1991King et al., 2004;Lin et al., 2010;Ushiro et al., 2007). For example, the larger number of new content words in distractors could be easily falsified, leading to high p-values (easier) because test takers considered those words as not included in the text (Drum et al., 1981). ...
... In particular, Kintsch (1990) reported that cognitive processes in charge of deleting or fusing redundant information become more effective in human subjects as their summarization skills are honed throughout educational levels. In cognitive psychology, summarization as a task is often used as a method to investigate cognitive processes involved in text comprehension and production (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978;Kintsch, 1990;Lehto, 1996;Kintsch & Walter Kintsch, 1998;Ushiro et al., 2013;Spirgel & Delaney, 2016). Such processes are in charge of generalizing, synthesizing, and coherently organizing content units. ...
... Successful text comprehension involves readers' understanding of various types of relations between events in the text (e.g., causal, temporal, special, and intentional relations), whereby pieces of the text are linked into a coherent whole (Kintsch, 1998). Among these relations involved in text comprehension, none has received more scrutiny than causal relations (e.g., Hosoda, 2017;McCrudden et al., 2009;Singer, Halldorson, Lear, & Andrusiak, 1992;Ushiro et al., 2015;Varnhagen, 1991). Causal relations are vital for text comprehension, as they constitute a necessary basis on which information can be logically and coherently interrelated. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/764463254876163-1559273651558_Q64/Akira-Hamada.jpg)
... However, Japanese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) often fail to comprehend what a whole text means (e.g., Ushiro, 2010). For example, Japanese EFL learners tend to maintain coherence of an only narrow part of texts (Morishima, 2013;Ushiro, Hosoda, et al., 2017;Ushiro, Nahatame, et al., 2016). More importantly, coherence breaks in text comprehension are not necessarily attributed to the mere lack of linguistic knowledge required to understand individual pieces of words and sentences because previous studies used simplified narratives so that Japanese EFL learners could be engaged in higher-level processing such as comprehension monitoring. ...
... (Ushiro, Hamada, Hasegawa, et al., 2015) 。 まず、テキスト理解とは何かを考えてみましょう。英文を読むと、どの単語がどのような 語順で使われていたかが、ごく短時間だけ記憶に残ります。正確な文構造はやがて記憶から 消えて、一字一句を正確に思い出すのは困難になります。例えば、"The demon was slain by the boy"(鬼が少年に殺された)を読んだあとに、英文の内容を思い出そうとしても、"The boy slew the demon" や "The demon was killed by the boy" などと別の文で再現されることが あります。それに対して、 「少年が鬼を討伐した」という英文の中心的な意味は長く記憶に 残ります。 読み手の記憶に残るイメージは、どのような背景知識(background knowledge)を持って 英文を読むかに影響されます。例えば、"The demon was slain by the boy"の boy を「桃太郎」 だと思うか、人気漫画の主人公だと思うかで、記憶に残るイメージが大きく異なるでしょう。 リーディングは読みながらイメージを頭の中で描く作業であり、書かれた内容を読み取る とともに、自分の持つ背景知識を重ね合わる作業が欠かせません (Kintsch, 1998 英文は基本的に主語 (誰が・何が) から始まるため、 上の意味順ボックスでも "The last thing…" を主語と考えます。次の "Ken needed" は動詞句ではないので、このかたまりは "The last thing" にくっつき、"The last thing Ken needed"(ケンにとって最も必要なかったもの〔＝最 悪の事態〕 )と解釈します。続いて be 動詞 "was" が登場するので、 「最悪の事態は『 何』『 で したか？』 」と自問自答すると、"his car breaking down" だとわかります。接続詞 "while" が 出てくると、また主語に戻って同じように読んでいきます。主語 "he" は「on one's way…」 に「いる〔-の途中〕 (be 動詞) 」であることも文法知識からわかります。複雑な英文を読む ときには意味順に従って意味の切れ目を考えると効果的です。 Q2 で触れたように、 文章を一貫して理解するためには、 文間のつながり (結束性；cohesion) を把握することが重要です。結束性には文法的結束性と語彙的結束性があります。例を見て みましょう。 文法的結束性：These medicines are effective in lowering fever. Some of them have been reported to have side effects.(これらの薬には解熱作用があります。中には副作用が報告されているも ...
... On the other hand, how IC is used in second-language (L2) learners is largely unknown. Note that L2 learners are widely known to experience difficulty making connections between information in discourse (Horiba, 1996;Ushiro et al., 2016;Ushiro et al., 2017). However, causes of such difficulty are not well specified primarily because most of the past L2 studies have targeted largescale connections spanning multiple sentences, with word-level semantics (including IC) that build a basis for such inter-sentential connections being little addressed (see Cheng & Almor, 2017, for an exception). ...
