THE USE OF EXAMPLES IN EXPOSITORY TEXTS - OUTLINE OF AN INTERPRETATION THEORY FOR TEXT ANALYSIS

Much has been made about the difficulties students have in transferrin g their learning from one context to another. We suggest that students learning from examples use 'imitation,' a subtype of analogical probl em solving (APS). Whereas APS involves manipulating a mental represent ation, imitation involves mapping the surface features of a source exa mple to a target problem and no assumptions are made about what a stud ent 'knows'. Often imitating a 'close variant' of a source problem is likely to be relatively successful; however, trying to solve a 'distan t variant' by imitating an example creates difficulties in mapping val ues and adapting the source example to the target. Ln this paper we ar gue that some students' inability to transfer their learning is very o ften due to the teaching material rather than any 'failure' on the par t of the student. To this end, we have developed an interpretation the ory based on the proportional analogy framework (a:b::c:d) which can b e applied to text analysis. The theory is demonstrated using examples taken mainly from computer programming textbooks.