Sentences are understood by outlining associative relations between the concepts representing the meanings of the words. When the words are received the activation spreads from their conceptual counterparts to the other concepts in memory, so that some implicit thoughts are often added to the mental representation of a sentence. As sentences are presented in a text the associative relations between the sentences ought to be taken into account. Implicit relations are inferred by the aid of spreading activation, which means that neither the number nor the exact content of all the associative relations is known. Because the capacity of active memory is limited, some selection must take place so that only the most essential things are kept in mind during reading. Teenagers often encounter difficulties when trying to pick out the most essential associations amongst all the alternatives. The solution to this problem is to help in text understanding by channeling the selection. A classification system was developed to categorize the different types of associations and the definitions were then transformed into questions. In a trial experiment pupils discussed student-written summaries on expository newspaper texts and used the questions for criticism. If this technique is applied repeatedly to several texts with different content, it is probable that the students will learn to learn. (A list of meaning relations and a figure are included, and 19 references are appended.) (MS)