Multilingual Text Comprehension: Cognitive, Developmental, and Educational Aspects

Until today, research on monolingual text processing has offered a broad spectrum of results and theoretical explanations of how texts are processed. This book extends the current trend to cover only reading comprehension by considering extensively listening comprehension. Comprehensive presentations of research on children’s listening comprehension allow for a broader developmental perspective reaching preschool years. Although text comprehension is the essence of learning in educational settings, and children are confronted continuously with the challenge of getting information from texts, comprehensive publications on children’s text comprehension are scarce. The author posits that a comprehensive review of children’s comprehension processes has to analyze the development of fundamental cognitive processes involved in comprehension. Therefore, this book covers the impact of working and long-term memory, metamemory, inference making, and gist building on comprehension performance.The role of first and multilingual language proficiency and tasks on specific component processes of text comprehension are discussed. Research results concerning the function of multilingual proficiency and tasks in text comprehension are complemented by the author’s own published and unpublished research. Theoretical considerations lead to models attempting to cover aspects of multilingual text comprehension. The aim of the book is to present a state-of-the-art overview of the field to inform researchers and students of various disciplines and practitioners to improve their understanding of how to foster multilingual text comprehension.

About the Author

Ute Schönpflug , PhD., Prof. adj. emer. received her education at Northwestern University and in Germany. She taught developmental/educational psychology at Martin-Luther University (Halle/Germany) and Free University Berlin. She was associate editor of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology for ten years and published part of her research in a volume on Cultural Transmission.

She is author and co-author of several psychology textbooks.