Schema is known to play an important role in reading comprehension. The schema embodying the learners background knowledge of cultural familiar materials facilitates the understanding of the text （Pritchard, 1990）. ...Schema is known to play an important role in reading comprehension. The schema embodying the learners background knowledge of cultural familiar materials facilitates the understanding of the text （Pritchard, 1990）. Also Steffensen, Joag-Dev, and Anderson （1979） and Nelson （1987） proposed that the schemata embodying background knowledge influenced how well the text would be comprehended. However, Hudson （1982） and Carrell （1984） found there was no significant background effect in advanced level learners. From those studies, it seems that background effect is different at different language proficiency levels. Thus, the present study examines the interaction between background knowledge and language proficiency in reading comprehension. The participants were freshmen of National Chiayi University. They were divided into three language proficiency levels based on the General English Proficiency Test. Four reading comprehension tests were constructed to assess their reading comprehension： cultural familiar/unfamiliar text and topic familiar/unfamiliar text. The results of this study showed that participants had better performance on the culture/topic familiar text than the culture/topic unfamiliar text. Thus the findings suggest that the teacher can use teaching activities, such as pre-reading activities or vocabulary teaching to increase the background knowledge when teaching readings to EFL （English as a foreign language） learners展开更多
Listening is the most important and different skill among the fbur basic language skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing. Schema theory holds the view that listeners＇ background knowledge plays a key role ...Listening is the most important and different skill among the fbur basic language skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing. Schema theory holds the view that listeners＇ background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. Applying schema theory to teaching listening comprehension, the author introduces the ＂three-stage＂ teaching mode. Activating the existing schemata and building the related semantic map in the pre-listening stage, bettering the semantic map in while-listening stage, and practicing the newly-existed schemata in post-listening stage can make all the teaching procedures a whole, and make students feel much easier to understand the listening materials.展开更多
文摘Schema is known to play an important role in reading comprehension. The schema embodying the learners background knowledge of cultural familiar materials facilitates the understanding of the text （Pritchard, 1990）. Also Steffensen, Joag-Dev, and Anderson （1979） and Nelson （1987） proposed that the schemata embodying background knowledge influenced how well the text would be comprehended. However, Hudson （1982） and Carrell （1984） found there was no significant background effect in advanced level learners. From those studies, it seems that background effect is different at different language proficiency levels. Thus, the present study examines the interaction between background knowledge and language proficiency in reading comprehension. The participants were freshmen of National Chiayi University. They were divided into three language proficiency levels based on the General English Proficiency Test. Four reading comprehension tests were constructed to assess their reading comprehension： cultural familiar/unfamiliar text and topic familiar/unfamiliar text. The results of this study showed that participants had better performance on the culture/topic familiar text than the culture/topic unfamiliar text. Thus the findings suggest that the teacher can use teaching activities, such as pre-reading activities or vocabulary teaching to increase the background knowledge when teaching readings to EFL （English as a foreign language） learners
文摘Listening is the most important and different skill among the fbur basic language skills---listening, speaking, reading and writing. Schema theory holds the view that listeners＇ background knowledge plays a key role in understanding a new text. Applying schema theory to teaching listening comprehension, the author introduces the ＂three-stage＂ teaching mode. Activating the existing schemata and building the related semantic map in the pre-listening stage, bettering the semantic map in while-listening stage, and practicing the newly-existed schemata in post-listening stage can make all the teaching procedures a whole, and make students feel much easier to understand the listening materials.
