ANALYSIS OF THE TYPES OF PAUSES IN STUDENT TEXTUAL VERBALIZATION
ANALYSIS OF THE TYPES OF PAUSES IN STUDENT TEXTUAL VERBALIZATION

Summary/Abstract: Reading is a cognitive activity, a means by which teachers can assess students' level of understanding based on reading strategies. Inference of a student’s processing level, of text understanding, is based on an analysis of reading strategies. We used a series of tests in which students were asked to read a text loudly, stop after each section of the text read and explain what they understood so far. Explanations given by students after each read section represent a step ahead in determining the level of text understanding. Verbalizations have been manually assessed and different correlation elements were found within each one of them. The first aspect analyzed in terms of the text understanding level was the manual calculation of the text reading speed and the verbalization speed. We express the overall average speed of the text read as the number of words read in relation to the duration of the text read, and the overall average speed of verbalization is the number of words rendered in relation to the duration of verbalization. The values obtained were used to achieve a correlation between text reading speed and text understanding level, between verbalized text speed and text understanding level. In relation to these results, we can achieve a classification of pause types from texts read and verbalizations made by students. A feature used in classifying the types of pauses in reading a text can be subject to the text understanding level, text reading method, age psychology which may influence the reading of a text. Pauses encountered in reading a text or in verbalizing it appear as hesitations, word repetitions, and interruptions, such type of pause being related to a certain pause feature. From a cognitive point of view, pauses may be classified in terms of what the student thinks while reading a text or during verbalization. We can have another classification of pauses in terms of text reading speed and verbalization speed. A text that is quickly understood and read shows very rare pauses and we can call these short breaks, while in a text that is not understood and is read slowly, with difficulty, pauses can be interruptions or fragmentations. Pauses in the form of hesitations usually occur in the verbalization when a text’s self-explanation is not clearly understood.

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