1990'2, p.110
Kosilova M. F.
The wastefullness of brain economic strategy
(RESUME)

The paper deals with a particular case of incong-ruence between effort and result: a large amount of time and forceconsuming exercises invented by foreign language teachers to cope with the persistent tendency of the students to ignore formal grammatical means when reading scientific literature - and inefficiency of all that. It can be supposed that the teachers do not take into account some peculiarities of the deep psychological mechanisms of processing information. The paper argues that by reading scientific literature the students use a holistic strategy that corresponds to the principle of least effort by reading the texts with high predictability but turns out to be inadequate with less predictable material. The analytical strategy as running counter to the principle of economy is very difficult to develop. A method aiming at achieving this goal is proposed.