According to Van. Dijk

· Text/talk is read/heard & interpreted on line, unit by unit (e.g., word by word)

· On the basis of world knowledge, as well as knowledge of words, syntactic structure, overall meaning (topics), discourse structures & aspects of context (goals etc.) such units are assigned provisional meaning.

Parallel to this understanding of the respective units of the text language users activate an old, or construct a new (mental) model of the events or situation the text is about.

Models are both personal (featuring individual knowledge, beliefs, opinions of language users) as well social (applying general, socially shared knowledge), but each model is unique.

The whole process of understanding is coordinated by the model language users have of the communicative situation, namely their context model. The context model tells the language users what the aims of the discourse are, who are the participants & what are their roles, what they know & do not yet know, in what setting the discourse is being understood & so on. It is necessary to understand such diverse properties of discourse as its intonation, lexical & syntactic style, which meanings are expressed or left implicit & what speech acts are being performed. The process of discourse production may be characterized in a similar way but in a different direction starting with a mental model that is something you know or having an opinion about, is gradually (step by step) transformed in the meanings of a discourse & then expressed word for word, following the constraints of the context model.