Keyword: «control theory»

Education and development of schoolchildren is closely connected with reading, so improving the text reading efficiency is one of the problems intensively studied by various scientists in the field of didactics, psychology and linguistics. Reading involves extracting information from the text, which requires decoding phonetic relationships between letters and sounds, as well as understanding the meaning. The result of reading depends on the parameters of the reader and the text he/she reads. The aim of the work: 1) using the information-cybernetic approach, to create a simulation model of the reader’s (pupil’s) activity, taking into account the psychological patterns of perception, remembering and forgetting information, that would allow us to investigate the main regularities of reading texts; 2) to study the behavior of this model under different characteristics of the reader and the text; to explain the results obtained. The system-cybernetic approach is applied, as well as methods of qualitative, mathematical and computer modeling. In the proposed simulation model, human memory is modeled by three matrixes in which syllables, words and sentences are «remembered». Numbers from the intervals [0; 1] are matrix elements, which are equal to the probabilities of correct reproduction of these components of the text. Syllable recognition is modeled as a random process with a probability 0.05 – 1. When the pupil has read all the syllables correctly, he understands the word being read, and the corresponding element of the matrix is assigned 1. After reading the sentence, the pupil tries to understand its meaning; the result depends on the degree of understanding and memorization of the words that make up this sentence. The model takes into account: 1) the multilevel structure of the reader's memory; 2) the probabilistic nature of reading syllables, understanding words and sentences; 3) the exponential law of forgetting uncomprehended information (syllables); 4) the logistic law of forgetting comprehended information (words, sentences); 5) the effect of feedback on the repeated reading of words and sentences in case of their incomprehension; 6) reducing the speed of forgetting information during re-reading. As a result of the pupil’s reading simulation, we obtain the graphs of the level of the entire text and separate sentences comprehension dependence on time; it is shown that the time of reading the text depends seriously on the «reader’s» characteristics and the text parameters. The situations when the reader (pupil) poorly reads syllables, slowly understands and quickly forgets the read text are also considered here. The computer program used is written in the Free Pascal environment and consists of nested loops that correspond to the reading of syllables, words and sentences. The novelty lies in the fact that an imitational model of the reader was created, with the help of which the dependence of the student’s knowledge on time, the student’s working time with text on reading speed, the degree of understanding of various sentences on their ordinal number with different text parameters was studied.