Abstract :
The restoration and reconsideration of introspection method for discovering the curtained-off aspects of the human mind in the last few decades have led researchers to tackle the issue more seriously than ever. Within the field of Applied Linguistics, and to the present writer’s best knowledge, the study of reading comprehension has attracted the attention of introspection researchers more than other language skills (Klopp, Schneider, & Stark, 2020). The reason for this may lie in the convolutions of reading comprehension and the inquisitiveness of man to improve his understanding of it.
Cognitive psychologists, who were interested in unravelling exactly what it means to comprehend a piece of text, began to examine mental processes involved in reading comprehension in the late 1880s (Bowels, 2010; Venezky, 1984). Psychologists were also instigating experimental studies to get access to mental processes of readers under firmly meticulous, laboratory-based conditions in which only trained subject-observers were utilized (Pritchard, 1990). Accordingly, and occasionally, the observers had to practice up to 10.000 think-aloud before they were actually involved in a formal experiment (Liberman, 1979). These conscientious efforts obviously reflect the prominence of such mental accounts for the psychologists of the time. However, soon the use of introspection as a scientific method was abandoned and disfavoured for few decades though research on reading comprehension was not stopped. Failure in replication was an important reason for its being disfavoured (Ericson & Simon, 1990; Hample, 1984). Introspective psychologists, however, believed that all mental processes were accessible to conscious observation but failed to answer replication question. The abandonment of introspection influenced reading research to the extent that no study of reading process using introspection was conducted during this time. Moreover, reading research was influenced by the rise of behaviourism during the 1930s and 1940s which emphasized overt behaviour of human cognition.
While introspection was not totally abandoned under the rigid influence of behaviourism, Duncker (1935) invented a variation of introspection paradigm called think-aloud. In fact, Duncker differentiated between introspection and think aloud which did not require the use of naïve and untrained participants. Therefore, instead of playing the role of subject-observer, it was the researcher who was to infer the participants’ mental processes from their verbal reports (Newell & Simon, 1972). In the 1950s and 1960s, the cognitive psychologists re-examined the methodology of the early classical psychologists. Consequently, it was argued that the responses of highly trained participants were not natural and hence less valid. As an alternative, cognitive psychologists emphasized the use of untrained participants in introspective experiments since their natural verbal reports were more important for the cognitive psychologists. Nevertheless, reading research in first and second language studies did not receive any influence from the findings of the cognitive psychology which did not see any immediate reading classroom solution as a result of their investigations into the reading process.
The late 1960s witnessed a sharp movement which opened new vistas into cognitive research of the reading process by the work of eminent reading psycholinguists such as Goodman (1967) and Smith (1971). The early work in ESL reading viewed reading as a bottom-up process or serial decoding of letters (Ghonsooly, 2012). Within this new reading paradigm, introspection was employed as a reading process instrument in first and second language studies. In 1971, Fareed used introspection in the first language and later on Hosenfeld (1977) and Olshavsky (1976) employed it in the second language which marked a renewed interest in introspection as a powerful tool of mental research in classical psychology. Examining problem-solving theory of reading and influenced by the work of Newel and Simon, Olshavsky employed introspection to unravel mental processes and strategies in solving mathematical and logical problems. The use of introspection became more popular in the 1980’s when researchers used it in first and second language (e.g., Afflerbach & Johnston, 1984; Cavalcanti, 1983; Cohen, 1987; Rankin, 1988), to name a few. This interest is seen in ESL reading studies in the 1980’s and early 1990’s with more emphasis laid on cognitive psychology (Baker & Brown, 1984; Connor, 1987; Hosenfeld, 1981; Just & Carpenter, 1984; Long & Richards, 1990).
The emergence of cognitive psychology and its collaboration with reading research resulted in some changes in Applied Linguistics, which is reflected in shifts from product to process research. Scholars questioned the usefulness of product-oriented reading research and emphasized the importance of discovery, adaptation and enquiry based on the idea that education is mostly concerned with unexpected rather than predicted results. Reading researchers such as Alderson and Urquhart (1984) argued that by distinguishing and characterizing the processes and strategies which readers utilize we may find general elements across different texts which may allow us to improve their reading and that the findings of product-oriented reading research are less illuminating in terms of explaining the cause of reading problems (Garner, 1982). They also emphasized the importance of distinguishing what reading processes successful and unsuccessful readers use which give rise to the possibility to teaching strategies of successful readers to unsuccessful ones.
