Using Causal Network Theory to Investigate Young Learners' Reading Processes During Story Continuation Tasks

Story continuation tasks, which require integrated reading and writing, have been adopted in China's National Matriculation Test in recent years. Most previous research centered on the writing phase yet overlooked the reading of the tasks. The present study explores the features of students' cognitive processes in the reading phase. Eight participants from a senior high school completed the task and participated in think‐aloud protocols as well as semi‐structured interviews. The data were analyzed using a causal network framework. Results revealed that students (i) mainly adopted a problem‐solving approach, (ii) made inferences about character traits and character emotions to maintain character consistency between the source and written texts, and (iii) constructed a causal network in the source text and extended the network in the writing with the purpose of achieving global causal coherence between the given and continuing parts. Comprehension of causal connections influenced alignment of the continued storyline with the source text. The present study revealed the importance of source text reading in the story continuation task and offered insights into the construct of narrative‐based testing tasks.