Earticle

The learner-centered nature of strategies-based instruction (SBI), which promote language learning and human growth processes, along with the mental processing hypothesis with its stress on optimal cognitive load as a learning prerequisite, provided the incentive to this study. We investigated the contribution of a one-year-long SBI to the nurturing of intrapersonal skills (psychological outcome), and inferential knowledge and reading ability (educational benefits). Forty undergraduates experienced strategy training (treatment group) and normal reading instruction (control group) for 50 class sessions over two consecutive semesters. The treatment group practiced strategy training and higher-order (critical and creative) reading processing, while the control group experienced traditional instruction mainly focused on comprehension checks, vocabulary development, and writing activities. SBI significantly contributed to the promotion of intrapersonal, reading, and inferential skills, but was ineffective for display knowledge development. The results were accounted for in light of the information processing and mental effort hypotheses and were consistent with human development and education for life paradigms.

This study investigates how working memory (WM) capacity and L2 linguistic knowledge affect L2 literal and inferential reading comprehension, considering the presence or absence of background knowledge. Eighty upper-intermediate to advanced adult English learners participated, completing tasks to assess WM capacity, background knowledge, L2 linguistic knowledge, and reading comprehension (both literal and inferential). Stepwise regression analyses revealed that WM capacity had a stronger influence on both literal and inferential comprehension when background knowledge was absent. For literal comprehension, L2 linguistic knowledge was the sole predictor when background knowledge was present, while WM capacity dominated in its absence. Inferential comprehension was consistently predicted by WM capacity, regardless of background knowledge. These findings indicate that WM capacity and L2 linguistic knowledge influence L2 reading comprehension differently depending on background knowledge and the type of comprehension. Implications include incorporating WM training into L2 reading instruction and employing diverse WM assessment methods to measure WM independently of L2 linguistic proficiency.

Knowledge acquisition is the process that extracts the required knowledge from available sources, such as experts, textbooks and databases, for incorporation into a knowledge-based system. Knowledge acquisition is described as the first step in building expert systems and a major bottleneck in the efficient development and application of effective knowledge based expert systems. One cause of the problem is that the process of human reasoning we need to understand for knowledge-based system development is not available for direct observation. Moreover, the expertise of interest is typically not reportable due to the compilation of knowledge which results from extensive practice in a domain of problem solving activity. This is also a problem of modeling knowledge, which has been described as not a problem of accessing and translating what is known, but the familiar scientific and engineering problem of formalizing models for the first time. And this formalization process is especially difficult for knowledge engineers who are often faced with the difficult task of creating a knowledge model of a domain unfamiliar to them. In this paper, we propose an automated knowledge acquisition tool which is based on an implementation of the Inferential Modeling Technique. The Inferential Modeling Technique is derived from the Inferential Model which is a domain-independent categorization of knowledge types and inferences ［Chan 1992］. The model can serve as a template of the types of knowledge in a knowledge model of any domain.