Instructional Science 30: 129–152, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 129 Referential perspective and instruction: A study on teacher-student interaction and text remembering ANDRÉS SANTAMARÍA ∗ & MANUEL L. DE LA MATA Laboratorio de Actividad Humana, Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Sevilla, C/ Camilo José Cela s/n 41005, Sevilla, Spain ( ∗ author for correspondence, e-mail: santamar@psicoexp.us.es) Abstract. The aim of this paper is to study the role of teacher-student interaction, in the acquisition of text comprehension and memory skills from a socio-cultural approach. In our view, one of the most important areas of neglect in cognitive research in this field is the interactional nature of that development. We intend to establish the way in which teacher- student interaction and, specially, the use of some specific semiotic means may facilitate the acquisition and internalization of general strategies for understanding and remembering expository texts. The role of referential perspective (Wertsch, 1989) in the internalization of complex text study actions is analysed. The task was to study three expository texts that were similar in their structure. The content of the texts was analysed in terms of idea-units (Meyer, 1984). Each text was formed by idea- units from three different levels: main ideas, secondary ideas and details. A category system for the analysis of study and recall of the text is developed. In the study phase the analysis proceeded in two steps: study actions and text ideas. In the recall phase, two types of indexes (number of ideas and degree of clustering) were considered. For the analysis of instructional actions, both the nature of instruction and referential perspective was recorded. Keywords: instruction, interaction, referential perspective, semiotic mediation, text remembering The study of text comprehension and memory is an important research field in cognitive and educational psychology. The analysis of the strategies employed by readers to understand and remember the texts occupies a central place in these studies (Palincsar and Brown, 1984; Gutiérrez Calvo, 1992; Sánchez, 1993). Authors such as Meyer and others claim that good readers employ their knowledge of text structure to monitor comprehension, facilit- ating the construction of an organized and coherent representation of the text. They are able to recognize the global organization of the text and employ the structure strategy (Meyer, 1985; Meyer and Rice, 1991). This strategy involves the use of the top-level structure in a particular text as an organiza- tional framework to facilitate encoding and retrieval. Subjects recognize the dominant rhetorical relationships that make it possible to organize propos-