Specific Construction for Educational Hypertext Application

(source: my thesis- improving learning ability through hypertext system)

Hypertext Learning Model

In this writing, author restricts to review human learning model from two main activities concerning with reading and writing academic document. Reading and writing models have been developed by cognitive psychologists that can be used to understand non-linear thinking by human beings [Rada, 1991]. This review is important to evaluate student’s improvement in learning academic text through hypertext application.

The understanding of knowledge, like in text format, has four levels: lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic [Rada, 1991]. At the lexical level, the reader reveals the meaning for every word while at the syntactic level, the reader determine the subject, predicate and object of a sentence. In the semantic level, the reader determines the meaning of a sentence. In the pragmatic level, the reader combines his/her knowledge and external knowledge with semantic meaning to get text understanding. The process of reading starts from lexical to syntactic, to semantic and to pragmatic levels in that order. However, readers may proceed from words to sentences, to paragraphs and to the overall document, the progress is more forward and backward -- non-linearly.

Tolhurst [1995, p.22] argues that "hypertext can be viewed functionally as nodes of information that are linked, allowing readers to follow a variable reading path of associations based on semantic links”. Hence, at this level hypertext is able to support learners in creating documents with semantic level, which can be accessed non-linearly.

(to be continued to: Writing and Reading Model)

References:

[Rada, 1991] Rada, Roy, 1991, Hypertext: From Text to Expertext, McGraw Hill Publishers.

[Tolhurst, 1995] Tolhurst, D., 1995, Hypertext, Hypermedia, Multimedia Defined, Educational Technology, 35(2), 21-26.