A. BACKGROUND
The literature on reading notes two different types of
SCHEMA, or background knowledge, that the reader brings to bear on a text. The
first class of prior knowledge has to do with content schema relevant to the
content area and culture knowledge. An example of this is the ‘ship
christening’ schema that was presented
in Chapter 2 in the discussion of Anderson and pearson’s (1984)
schema-theoretic model of reading. The
second type schema is formal schema. This represents the background
knowledge the reader has regarding how
syntax is used to structure text, cohesive relations, and the rhetorical
organization of different text type. This chapter will focus on concerns of
content schema, or background knowledge , while the next chapter will focus on
formal schema issues.
Before proceeding, a
note about terminology in schema
theory needs to be made. The term schema is
some times used as a singular term with schemata
as the plural noun form. However, the literature also often uses the term schema in a generic or non-count sense
as a term such as ‘schema theoretic’ or ‘types of schema’. Further, a schema
may be very well developed and robust , as in all of the things that we would
accept might take place in church. It may not be the case that an individual
has one schema for the sermon, another for Sunday school, and yet another for
communion. In one of the earliest uses of the term, Kant (1963, Smith
translation) writes:
Indeed,
it is schema, not images of objects, which underlie our pure sensible concepts.
No image could ever be adequate to the concept of a triangle in general. It
would never attain that universality of the concept which renders it valid of
all triangles, whether right-angle, obtuse-angled, or acute-angled; it would
always be limited to a part only of this sphere. The schema of the triangle can
exist nowhere but in thought…. This schematism of our understanding, in its
application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real
modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.
This much only we can assert: the image
is a product of the empirical faculty of reproductive imagination; the schema
of sensible concept, such as figures in space, is a product and, as it were, a
monogram, of pure a priori imagination, though which, and accordance with
which, images themselves first become possible. These images can be
connected with the concept only be means
of the schema to which they belong. In themselves, they are never completely
congruent with the concept. On the other hand, the schema of a pure concept of
understanding can never be brought into any image whatsoever. (Kant1963: 182-3)
The term is used in its
generic form here, meaning all possible triangles and ‘images connected with a
concept by means of the schema to which they belong’. This usage will continue
here, incorporating the plural, schemata
of plural distinctly referring multiple instances.
Introduction to content
and culture schema
As noted the discussion
in chapter 2 of Anderson and pearson’s (1984) schema-theoretic view of reading,
an area of major of importance in the reading process relates to how background
knowledge/schemata and cultural understanding affect text comprehension. As
Freire and Macedo (1987) state:
Reading
does not consist merely of decoding the written word of language; rather it is
preceded by and intertwined with
knowledge of the world. Language and reality are dynamically interconnected.
The understanding attained by critical reading of the text implies perceiving
the relationship between text and content. (Anderson and Pearson 1984)
Background knowledge
plays a role in terms of facts known and assumptions held about the world, what
have been termed script, plans, or goals (Shank and Ableson 1977). Here we
refer to the nature of a reader’s default concepts about evens and settings.
Prior knowledge may have a facilitating effect because a reader who already has
an elaborate schema can more easily fit incoming textual information into that
schema. Background knowledge can also be related to values and judgments that
are made about an event by a reader, values that are due to social experience
and cultural mores. Both of these aspects of background knowledge will affect
the extent to which a second language reader constructs meaning that is in any
way consistent whit the meaning a first language reader likely to construct, as
well as whether two first language or two second language readers construct the
same meaning. As Malik (1990) states, echoing Goodman (1984), ‘because
comprehension results from reader-text transaction, what the reader knows, who
the reader is, what values guide the reader, and what purposes or interests the
reader has will play a vital role in the reading process’ (207).
However, the reader’s
background knowledge does not simply represent the contents of a repository
filled with random relevant and irrelevant ideas. The background knowledge also
reflects expectations of importance, relevance, and structure. Sometimes these
expectations reflect biases, and these colored expatiations can become goals
and self-fulfilling prophecies in the comprehension process. When considering
the role of background knowledge, we
should not view schema as controlling immutable structures. If this were so, we
would be hard-pressed to explain how to learning and conceptual change take
place. Rather, the knowledge structures are part of more complex coding that
involves propositional representation, bottom-up-word-meaning generation, and
mental imaging. These is an interaction among all of these coding sources
(Nassaji 2002;Sadoski 1999). The application of mental representations involves
processes of constraint satisfaction through which the reader determines the
extent to which the emerging message is consistent, or satisfying.
B.
FORMULATION OF THE PROBLEM
1.
WHAT IS SCHEMA?
2.
WHAT IS FORMAL SCHEMA?
BAB II
DISCUSSION
A.
CONTENT
SCHEMA AND BACGROUND KNOWLEDGE
The definition of schema
The basic premise of schema theory is that text is
ambiguous. As Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) write, “... text, any text, whether
written or spoken, does not by itself carry meaning. Rather, according to
schema theory, a text only provides directions for listeners or readers as to
how they should retrieve or construct meaning from their own, previously
acquired knowledge” (p 76). Thus, our background knowledge affects our
interpretation of the text. To illustrate, let me provide these two examples.
a) The
car was too expensive.
b) The
coffee was too expensive.
Our
interpretation of the word ‘expensive’ in sentence (a) is likely to be very
different from our interpretation of the same word in sentence (b). From our
life experiences we know the typical price of a car as well as the typical
price of an expensive car, and we know expensive coffee, in a normal world,
will always be cheaper. Anderson and Pearson (1984), citing a study done by
Halff, Ortony and Anderson (1976), write that a person’s interpretation of the
color red is different in each of the following compounds: red strawberry, red
barn, red sunset and red hair (p 52). Thus, our background knowledge, and the
context in which the word is placed, affects our interpretation of that word.
Further,
our interpretation of text is influenced by what we have read before. Notice
how the sentence, ‘He didn’t have enough money’, can be interpreted differently
in the following examples.
c)
The car was too expensive. He didn’t have enough money
d)
The coffee was too expensive. He didn’t have enough money
In
sentence (c), ‘He didn’t have enough money’, is likely to be interpreted as he
didn’t have enough savings, whereas in sentence (d) he probably has enough
money at home or in the bank, but he doesn’t have enough money on him right
now. From the above definitions, we may conclude that schema is the prior
knowledge gained through experiences stored in one’s mind. It is an abstract
structure of knowledge.
Schema and schema theory
Schemata
are based on the assumption that knowledge stored in our mind is well-organized
rather than randomly structured. They form independently by virtue of the
contents each schema contains. On the other hand they are related by nodes,
which enable them to communicate when necessary. Nearly all cognitive
definitions of schema stem from Bartlett "An active organization of past
reactions of past experiences, which must always be supposed to be operation in
any well-adapted organic response.
From
the above definitions, we may argue that knowledge or learning is constructed
from experience and stored in memory and opposed to knowledge existing on a
page. Every one of us has a uniquely personal store of knowledge gained through
experiences in his or her lifetime. This stored knowledge along with its
storage structure is called schemata . This term is often used in its singular
form--schema-- that refers to an organized chunk of knowledge or experience,
often accompanied by feelings or emotions associated with experience at the
time the information was stored. Take eating out in a restaurant for example.
When we go to a restaurant, we expect certain
things
to happen--we are seated and given menus; we are given some time, then someone
asks us what we want; we order, then wait; our food comes and we eat it; they
take our plates and give us our bills; we pay our bill with money in our
wallet.
The types of schema
Researchers
have identified several types of schemata. In literacy it is often said that
there are three types of schemata: language schemata, formal schemata and
content schemata, which are closely related to reading comprehension.
The functions of schema
There
are two processes in the utilization of schema: schema identification and
schema application. The former one is essentially a pattern recognition process
and a data- driven process, that is, the schema is essentially activated by
information that is available to the reader just before the schema is
identified. There are at least two factors that influence the course of schema
identification. The first one is goodness-of-it--the appropriate schema has a
high likelihood of being identified if there is good match between the target
schema and the information that has accrued. The second one is the amount of
information that accrues--as the amount of information increases, there
generally is a higher likelihood that appropriate schema will be identified.
Once a schema has been identified, the schema invokes a number of processes in
a conceptually driven fashion, which is governed by the content and procedures
provided by the schema. The reading schema mainly has the following functions:
1
Providing background knowledge
2.Generating
expectations
3.Facilitating
inferences
4.Focusing
the reader's attention
Prior knowledge and first language
reading
This
chapter examines the effects that background knowledge has been shown
through research to have on text
comprehension and recall. A fairly rich tradition of studies in this area
exist, and indicates how background knowledge can affect comprehension, even
among children; who might be expected to have less well developed and
internalized background schemata than adults. Dochi (1994) summarizes results
which indicate that 30 per cent to 60 per cent of reading test variability can be
explained by prior knowledge. For example, Lipson (1983) studied the effect of
background knowledge on the reading performance of children in the fourth
through sixth grades who were of
differing religious backgrounds. The subjects were from two subcultures within
a larger society, Catholic and Jewish. Half of the subjects (n=160 were Catholics attending a
private Catholic school and half (n=16)
were Jewish attending a Hebrew day school. Each of the subjects read three
passages: a culturally neutral passage entitled The Ama , a passage entitled First
Communion , and a passage entitled Bar
Mitzuah. After reading each passage, the subjects wrote a free recall of
everything they remembered about the passage and answered ten recall
questions. Lipson found a significant
effect for group by passage in terms of reading time, with each group taking
less time to read the culturally familiar passage. The analysis further
found that the groups recalled more
explicit and implicit propositional
information from the familiar passage than from the less familiar
passage. A similar pattern was found for the recall questions. The results
support the concepts that background knowledge may assist in comprehension of a
text. However, it is also important to note that the subject tended to make
more errors in their interpretation of the unfamiliar text, distortions such as
thinking that the Torah was something to be worn or that communication wafer
was left behind by Jesus. Thus, schemata that mismatch the context of the target
text can create distortions and intrusions that are perhaps as detrimental to comprehension as a complete absence of
prior knowledge.
It
appears from the research that prior knowledge of a topic increases the amount
of information that recalled from a text on that topic. Reynolds et al. (1982)
also report on the effects of personal knowledge and cultural background on
text interpretation. In their study, African-American and white eighth graders
read a letter about an incident at school that could be interpreted as either a
school cafeteria fight or as an instance of ‘sounding’. ‘sounding’ is a type of ritual insult found
primarily in the African-American community. The object of sounding is to
establish status in the peer group by demonstrating skill at insulting the
opponent’s family members and making derogatory allusions regarding the
personal attributes and behaviors of those relatives. The students in the study
read a sort letter allegedly written by a boy to a friend who have move away.
The letter described a school day, highlighting an episode in the school
cafeteria. Again, the episode could be interpreted as a fight in the cafeteria
or as an instance of sounding. The results suggest that cultural schemata
influence reading comprehension. African-American subjects tended to indicate
that the text was about a sounding scenario, while the white students
interpreted the text as being about an actual fight. Reynolds et al.
hypothesize that culture influences knowledge and that knowledge affects reading
comprehension.
Further,
a great deal of the first language research has demonstrated that prior
knowledge significantly affects memory performance over and above aptitude
(Mart and Gormley 1982; Schneyder, Korkel, and Weinert 1989). Given that
background knowledge ca affect recall of information from a text, a question
arises as to relationship between background knowledge and reading ability in
text comprehension. Recht and Leslie (1988) examined whether prior knowledge or
reading expertise had the greater effect on recall. They note that research has
indicated that good readers have better recall than do poor readers (Ryan
1981), and that good and poor readers have been found to have similar
short-term recall when text topic is familiar (Taylor 1979). Recht and Lislie
divided 64 seventh and eighth-grade student into four categories of reading
ability and knowledge about the sport of baseball: 1)
high-ability/high-knowledge; 2)high-ability/low-knowledge;
3)low-ability/high-knowledge; 4)low-ability/low-knowledge. The subjects read a
passage describing a half inning of a baseball game. A replica of a baseball
field was presented along with wooden figures of baseball players. The subjects
moved the players to re-enact the reading passage and also provided a verbal
account of the action. Subsequently, they were asked to recall the passage and
sort randomly selected sentences from the passage into their importance for the
narrative. The analysis showed that the memory recalls of the high-knowledge
readers were significantly better than the recalls of the low-knowledge
readers, regardless of reading ability, both quantitatively and quantitatively
on the re-enactment activity, the verbal retelling, and the recall
summarization. Further, subjects with low knowledge but high reading ability
did not score better than the low-knowledge/low-ability subjects. Thus, high
knowledge of topic appears to provide a support that takes a load off
short-term memory and allows for compensation for lower general reading
ability.
Although
background knowledge has shown to assist compensation by challenged readers, it
is important to take into account Lipson’s (1983)finding that background
knowledge can also distort and intrude into the reading process. That is, the
reader’s reliance on background knowledge can be disadvantageous at times. Two
studies (Reutzel and Hollingsworth 1992; Reynolds et al. 1982) provide evidence
that while a text may be read with some fidelity in the short term, its
long-term reconstruction may reflect previously held opinions.
Prior knowledge and reading comprehension
Schema
theory proposes that readers possess different conceptual frameworks which they
bring to the reading of a text and which they use to make sense of what they
read.Many educators argue that knowledge is constructed from experience and
stored in memory as opposed to knowledge being absolute and absolute meaning
existing on a page. We all have a uniquely personal store of knowledge gained
through a lifetime of experience. This stored knowledge along with its storage
structure is called schemata, which refers to an organized chunk of knowledge
or experience, often accompanied by feelings or emotions associated with
experience at the time the information was stored. All human beings posses schemata
that they use to interpret the world. New information is processed according to
how it fits into these schemata. Information that does not fit into these
schemas may not be comprehended, or may not be comprehended correctly. This is
the reason why readers have a difficult time comprehending a text on a subject
they are not familiar with even if the person comprehends the meaning of the
individual words in the passage. Therefore, many reading theorists argue that
schema is the driving force .
From
what have been discussed above, it is easily to find that prior knowledge, in
the
form
of schema, influences our comprehension to a much greater degree than earlier
research would have suggested. So powerful is the influence of prior knowledge
on comprehension that Johnson and Pearson (1982) have found that prior
knowledge of a topic is a better predictor of comprehension than is either an
intelligence test score or a reading achievement test score.
Formal schemata and reading
comprehension
Formal
schemata are higher order structures containing knowledge of rhetorical
organization structures. Similarly, formal schemata's effects on reading
comprehension can also be tested by keeping the content of a text constant
while varying the rhetorical organization and having comparable groups of
subjects process each different rhetorical pattern. Various studies in both L1
and L2 show that text organization affect reading comprehension.
Content schemata and reading
comprehension
As
has been discussed in the former chapters, schemata are multiple knowledge
structures which include culture, beliefs, expectations, values, and other past
experiences which are used to comprehend the nature of things and events.
Content schemata refer to the knowledge relative to the content domain of the
reading passage.
Culture-specific content schemata
and reading comprehension
From
the above discussion we know that content has more influence on reading
comprehension. What should be mentioned is that one type of the content
schemata especially has a great and enormous influence on students' EFL reading
comprehension, that is, cultural-specific content schemata. The main reason
simply is that language and culture are closely related and learning a foreign
language is the learning of both language itself and its culture because there
are cultural differences which is considered to be one of the biggest obstacles
in English learning.Thus, this part will be intended to introduce the nature of
language learning's relationship with culture, and then the influence of
cultural-specific content schemata on
Cultural differences
As
we have got from social scientists, cultures differ from one another and each
culture is unique. Such differences are called cultural differences or cultural
diversities. Cultural differences here refer to the differences in cultures,
mainly those involving English language .
There
are some differences between Chinese and Western cultures, such as, kinship
terms, greetings, thanks and compliments, private and taboos. Cultural differences
are caused by different social customs, different models of thinking and
different concepts of value. The process of English learning is also a process
of culture learning. Buttjes (1990) argues that language acquisition does not
follow a universal sequence, but differs across cultures. The process of
becoming a competent member of society is realized through exchanges of
language in particular social situations. Thus, language must be learnt as an
integral part of learning about the target language's culture in order to gain
a deeper insight into the target language.
Take,
for example, the sentence "One interviewer eventually turned me down
because, he said, I lack eyeball contact.” In western cultures, there is a
saying, “Never trust a person who can’t look you in the eyes.” Eye contact is
very important during a conversation because too little eye contact may be seen
negatively by westerns, which is usually ignored by Chinese. The differences
may create barriers in Chinese students’ understanding of the sentence.
Therefore, culture learning will help promote language learning.
Implications for reading teaching
From
the theoretical discussion of schema theory and the survey of the situation of
the students’ schematic knowledge, it seems reasonable to state that schema
theory is of enormous significance in reading. In fact, English reading
teaching is not only a teaching of language points but also a teaching of the
culture, thus, it is meaningful and urgent to study various practical methods
of effective reading teaching associated with schema theory.
This
part will come to the practical purpose ---tentatively exploring the
implications from schema theory to English reading teaching. Since the major
trouble of students in the middle school environment lies in relevant schemata
background knowledge, in class, teachers should provide as much background
knowledge as possible for students, which will help students familiarize
themselves with the appropriate schemata that will be utilized in their
comprehension. After class, teachers should try to dream up as many useful
activities as possible to help students construct, increase and enrich their
schemata. The tentative suggestions are as follows:
1.
Accumulation of students' schemata
Individuals
acquire schemata through their experiences--- real and vicarious. As
individuals have more experiences, they refine, reshape, correct and
restructure their schemata. Through life experiences, schema adjustments are
made as readers continue having more and more experiences. So, their life
experiences will become various and much more abundant as the educated time
with teachers go by--both from the teachers and the teaching and reading
activities. In other words, teachers can help readers build and increase their
schemata through various methods or activities. Here are some suggestions as to
how to increase and enrich students' schematic knowledge.
2.
Activation of students' schemata
Because
reading materials are never completely explicit, readers must rely on
preexisting schemata to provide plausible interpretation. Yet, there is much
evidence that good and poor readers do not always use schemata appropriately or
are unaware of whether the information they are reading is consistent with
their existing prior knowledge. Also, there is evidence that students who do
not spontaneously use schemas as they read will engage them if given explicit
instructions prior to reading. Thus, pre-reading
3.
Construction of students' schemata
Students
can be taught to incorporate new information into their existing world
knowledge. This can be accomplished through teacher guided instruction and
self-initiated strategies that includes methods and meaningful materials that
induce critical thinking with conceptual problems. Four such strategies that
are designed to foster shared meaning between and among teachers and peers are:
cases, interactive videodiscs, hierarchical concept maps and Vee diagrams.
Background Knowledge
Impacts Reading Comprehension
Perhaps
the most well known effect of background knowledge is its ability to directly
influence the understanding of what is read (Stahl, Hare, Sinatra, &
Gregory, 1991). It makes perfect sense—the more you know about a topic, the
more likely it will be that you can comprehend what is written about it. For
instance, when reading an abstract of a scientific article (considered to be
the most difficult kind of text), educators are more likely to understand one
from the American Educational Research Journal than from the American
Journal of Nursing. It isn’t that you can’t decode the words or read them
fluently, but rather that you don’t have the background knowledge to understand
radiofrequency catheter ablation. The more extensive a reader’s background
knowledge is, the easier it is to acquire new information offered by the text
(Alfassi, 2004).
Background
knowledge also acts indirectly on reading comprehension. Fluency, an important
contributor to overall reading comprehension, is heavily impacted by the level
of background knowledge one possesses about a topic (Klauda & Guthrie,
2008). The ability to infer meaning in social studies texts is positively
influenced by the level of background knowledge the learner has (Tarchi, 2009).
Background Knowledge
Affects Vocabulary Learning
Vocabulary
is the means by which learning is articulated. Whether in writing or
discussion, the ability to use vocabulary accurately and incisively is a marker
of one’s command of a topic. In fact, vocabulary is often used as a proxy to
measure how learned a person is. Hart and Risley’s (1995) landmark study of
vocabulary knowledge at school entry age accurately predicted a child’s
achievement level years later. Similarly, Stahl and Fairbanks (1986) found that
vocabulary knowledge correlated to grades and standardized test scores.
In
social studies, vocabulary is explicitly tied to huge concepts that extend
beyond the sequential time lines of a single period. Words like population,
revolution, and migration describe concepts that “‘clump’
information in meaningful ways [to] allow students to handle the ‘long run’ of
history” (National Research Council, 2005, p. 69). Thus, a simple definition is
often inadequate for explaining how integral these concepts are to the study of
history or other social studies topics. This deep vocabulary meaning is built
through a growing bank of knowledge that is continually reorganized and
expanded. This deep bank is known as schema, a network of related knowledge
that forms a mental structure to understand complex systems. As new knowledge
is learned, the schema for the vocabulary becomes more sophisticated. Revolution
moves from defining a single event to being able to detect the
commonalities between the Glorious, American, and French Revolutions. Background
knowledge about these events leads to a deeper understanding of a new event.
Background Knowledge
Contextualizes Historical Thinking
To
understand history, one must be able to step away from specific content and
look for enduring understandings; he or she must also closely examine and
understand the time period being studied. It is not uncommon for students (and
even adults) at all levels to superimpose current or personal beliefs, values,
and mores onto events of the past. In some cases, these are valid. Societies of
the past and present recoil at the random taking of a human life, but they
differ when it comes to human sacrifice, political assassinations, crimes of
passion, etc. Knowledge of the time period being studied is needed in order to
understand how these events were perceived by contemporaries of the time—in
other words, to contextualize. As Reisman and Wineburg (2008) state:
Contextualized
historical thinking is impossible to accomplish without background knowledge.
One need not know everything about a historical moment, but a basic chronology
and some familiarity with key developments are fundamental. . . . Background
information allows students to decipher unfamiliar terms and create accurate
mental images as they read. Because teachers cannot expect students to know how
certain words were defined in the past or how today’s institutions differed,
such information must be provided. (p. 203)
Tarchi’s
(2009) study of seventh-grade students found that those who possessed a solid
bank of topical knowledge about history performed better on measures of reading
comprehension of history texts than students who lacked this foundation. The
author speculated that this was due in part to the discipline-specific need to
form causal relationships between events in order to understand their
significance, stating “the more facts the reader knows about a topic, the
better he/she will understand a text concerning that topic” (p. 419). The
background knowledge about an era serves to ground the new learning that will
occur in the lesson.
Instructional
Strategies to Increase Background Knowledge
Having
made the case that background knowledge is vital to learning history, it is
inadequate to stop there without discussing curricular and instructional
approaches to building this knowledge. These techniques ensure that background
knowledge is not overlooked in the rush to cultivate new learning. These
include teaching conceptually, teaching for transformation, and assessing
background knowledge in order to know where gaps may exist.
1)
Teach conceptually. History
is often unfairly perceived as the memorization of an endless list of events,
dates, and historical figures. Of course, it is far more than that, but
students can have a difficult time seeing the study of history as an
examination of the patterns that mark the human experience, the factors that
lead to the responses of leaders and societies, and the extraordinary events
that have signaled change. As well, it is rare for students to appreciate that
the historical record is not static, and that historians engage in debate and
critical analysis of events that occurred hundreds and even thousands of years
ago. But this is a logical, if incorrect, conclusion in classrooms where
isolated facts are emphasized at the expense of analysis.
An
important means for interrupting these misconceptions about the study of
history is to ground learning in enduring understandings, also known as big
ideas (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). Introducing students to statements such as
“People, places, and ideas change over time” anchors the study of units as
diverse as the Articles of Confederation, Charlemagne, and ancient Greece. The
use of enduring understandings assists students in recognizing the patterns
that have defined thousands of years of human history.
Understanding
is further deepened through the use of essential questions that foster inquiry.
Essential questions differ from enduring understandings in that they invite
students to drill down within a unit of study to find details that help to
answer the question. A unit on the shift from state rule through the Articles
of Confederation to a central government with the Constitution asks the
essential question, “How do governments change?” Thought-provoking questions
help students make sense of complex concepts and create opportunities for
debate and discussion because they do not have a singular, concrete answer.
Importantly,
the use of essential questions also fosters the kinds of critical thinking and
problem-solving skills necessary for advanced learning. For example, Twyman,
McCleery, and Tindal (2006) measured the achievement levels of two groups of
eighth-grade social studies students. One group was taught a unit on colonial
U.S. history that emphasized factual knowledge, while the other was taught the
same unit conceptually through the analysis of problems of that period of
history. While both groups performed similarly on a factual knowledge
assessment, the conceptual group performed significantly better on measures of
vocabulary and essay writing.
2) Teach for transformation. The Twyman,
et al., (2006) study highlights another important practice: the need to
actively engage with the content in order to make it one’s own. Students need
opportunities to transform ideas in their minds and on paper (Fisher, Schell,
& Frey, 2004). Simply giving them information with the expectation that
they will absorb it and then regurgitate it is an outdated pedagogical notion.
However, when students wrestle with ideas, the information becomes a part of
their knowledge bank. Collaborative projects give students hands-on experiences
to synthesize information and create new understandings (Frey, Fisher, &
Everlove, 2009). For instance, when a group of students work together to create
blog entries chronicling the travels of Paul, a disciple of Jesus Christ, they
engage in research, clarify one another’s thinking, and write in the character
of this historical figure. When students learning about Jamestown and Roanoke
work in groups to scout a location for the settlements, they analyze maps,
consider the needs of the settlers, and factor in what little knowledge the
settlers would have had of the native people who lived there. In each example,
students transform the information though oral and written language, and
solidify their background knowledge to be used in subsequent lessons.
3) Assess background knowledge. Assessment
should occur before and during instruction, and not just in summative exercises
at the end of a unit. Regarding background knowledge, it is valuable to
determine what will be needed and assess the extent to which students possess
it. If and when gaps are noticed, the teacher can actively build it to
facilitate new learning. We think of background knowledge as falling into two
categories: incidental and core. Incidental knowledge may be interesting but
peripheral to the main concepts, while core knowledge is essential to
understanding the new concepts that will be taught (Fisher & Frey, 2009).
For example, knowing that the ancient Greek and Roman empires have influenced
Western democratic practices for two millennia is core background knowledge for
a unit on the American Revolution, but knowing about Greek mythology is
incidental for the same unit of study.
Once core background knowledge has been identified, it can be
assessed through the use of an anticipation guide (Tierney & Readance,
2004). Such guides are comprised of five to ten short written statements that
students respond to as true or false. For example, an anticipation guide for
the American Revolution unit might include items such as “The birth place of
democracy is Athens” (true), and “The Greeks were responsible for developing
the first republic” (false). Student responses to these and other statements
provide insight into whether they have sufficient background knowledge for the
new information they will be learning. An additional advantage of using
anticipation guides is that they activate background knowledge by signaling
what kinds of information the students will be using during the new unit of
study.
B.
FORMAL SCHEMA AND SECOND LANGUAGE READING
Orthographic
and phonemic knowledge
Learners learning a
second language are often already literate in their first language. To the
extent that this is true, they will have existing knowledge that the graphic
features they encounter on a page or screen are to be translated into language
with a meaning. Also, as noted in chapter 4, readers are sensitive to the rules
of their script or writing system whether that system is LOGOGRAPHIC ( Chinese
characteres, japanes kanji, korean hanzza ), syllabic ( japanese kana, korean
hangul ), or alphabetic ( arabic, english, hebrew, spanish ), with each
corresponding symbol representing a word, morphem, syllable, or phonological
segment.
Logographs ( logo =
word, graph = written sign ) primarily represent the meaning of words or
morphemes, only secondarily representing the sounds of the words. Phonetic
scripts, on the other hand, have the sounds and sound sequences of morphemes
and words as a basis. However, the logogram versus phonogram distinction is not
in fact a complete dichotomy of orthographic principles. Both chinese and
japanese have cases in which characters are primarily phonetic representationof
syllables or parts of syllables with little regard to any symbol – meaning
correspondence ( DeFrancis 1989 ; unger and DeFrancis 1995 ). Indeed, some
scholars prefer the term sinographic to logographic ( Birch 2002 ; Henderson
1982 ) because Chinese characters are not completely logographic in nature,
given the presence of written RADICAL in approximately 80 per cent of the
characters.
First language
ortographic features are similar those of the
second language will affect the ease with which they make the transition
into fluent second language reading. For example, although readers come from
languagethat uses the same alphabetic script as that of the target language,
the language will differ interms of the distribution of latters, general length
of the written words, amount and types of diacrical marks, allowable consonant
clustres, and frequencyof upper and lower case, ( ferreiro 2002 ), further,
even if the alphabetic system is somewhat different from the target language
script ( for examplefrom spanish to English or Greek to English ).
Sounds are arbitrarily
assigned to the graphic representation and are not directly drivable.
As second language
learners apply their existing first language content schemata to the reading
process, it appears that they may apply their first language orthographic
processing strategies when reading in a second language as well. The
pseudo-characters contained differing combinations of outer and inner radicals
associated with the pronuncation of the character. The results indicated that
subjects from the morphographic language background processed the
phonologically inaccessible and accessible symbols equally well while the
subjects from the phonological orthography backround perpormed better on the
phonologically inaccessible pseudo-characters than on the phonologically
inaccessible pseudo-characters.
Differences in knowledge
of how orthographic systems operate can affect the success of reading in a new
language. The formal schematic knowledge by native readers of english that
phonetic orthographies can contain grammatical elements such as tense markers
(-ed) and part of speech indicators (-tion) is useful strategic information.
Syntax
and language structure
Learner’s second
language reading proficiancy will need to include an examination of the
learner’s general syntactic, morphological, and lexical knowledge. The role
that syntactic knowledge plays in second language reading comprehension would
on the face of it appear to be pervasive. It appears self-evident that a second
language readers command of grammar is essential to comprehension of the text
mofication are based almost entirely on syntactic simplification of text. The
level of control will need to be both in terms of recognozing the salint
features and being able to process the syntactic system with some efficiency.
For example, look at the following sentence ( langacker 1972 : 157 )
Pama-lu tyulpin
wanta-re-ina
Pama = man
Lu = ergative case marking
Tyulpin =
tree
Wanta = fall
Ri = causative affix
Ina = future marker
Little comprehension of
this sentence will happen unless the learner undrestand the syntactic and
morphological features of Tyapukay, a language of Australia. The learner will
not undrestand that the sentence means ‘ the man will fell the tree ‘. The fact
that future aspect is indicated by an affix rather than a particle and that the
causative marker is also an affix are essential pieces of formal schemata that
are necessary for comprehension of the sentence.
One reason that
syntactic formal schemata are of interest to second language researchers is
reflected in accounts of how this knowledge affects the ease or difficulty of
texts that the second language readers may encounter. One type of alteration
involved the syntactic simplification of the text while the other involved
revision to increase the clarity, cohesion, and text structure. The version
modified for clarification, cohesion, and text structure produced greater gains
in comprehension than did modification along syntactic lines.
There are three
versions each of 18 short passages.
1.
The was comprised of
short simple sentence.
2.
The was made up of
complex sentence with clues to underlying relationships.
3.
Consisted of complex
sentence without the clues to underlying relationship
The role of syntactic
simplification was examined for readers whose native languages were English,
Dutch, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as a small number of other
languages, while they were reading English for science and technology texts. It
was found that there were no significant differences between the groups reading
the authentic or the simplified text either in terms of comprehension or
reading time. Nor were there differences between the computer science majors
and the humanities majors.
Leow ( 1993 ) examined
the effects of lexical and syntactic simplification, type of linguistic item (
present perfect versus present subjunctive ), and amount of language exposure,
as measured by numbers of semesters in a Spanish as a foreign language course.
Rather subjects who had been exposed to the present perfect and the present
subjunctive recognized more of the target forms than those who had not been
exposed to the forms. Yano, Long, and Ross found that both simplified and
elaborated text versions increased comprehension of short texts over unmodified
versions of the same text. The simplified and elaborated text generally
increased comprehension over unmodified text. Elaboration and simplification
improve comprehension about the same amount, though neither was statistically
significantly higher than the unmodified versions of the text for these
learners. The study indicated a possible interaction between syntax and
vocabulary on recall. However, the students with low syntactic knowledge were
not aided regardless of their vocabulary score. Likewise, high syntax scores
did not aid students with low vocabulary knowledge. Barnett’s conclusions are that vocabulary not be
stressed to the exclusion of syntax since syntax appears to play a significant
role in comprehension. For the syntax cloze items, the range of scores in each
level was :
Low : 10 -17
Medium : 18 – 24
High : 21 – 24.
For the vocabulary
items, the ranges of scores were :
Low : 10 – 15
Medium : 16 – 18
High : 19 – 24.
Text
structure
The previous section
has indicated some of the effects of cohesion on coherence and comprehension.
This section examines research that addresses the role that text structure
plays in reading. The term text structure refers to how the ideas in a text are
structured to convey a message to a reader (Carrell 1992). Clearly, some of the
ideas presented in a text are central to the message and others are less
central. Hence, text structure designates how concepts are related as well as
which concepts are related as well as which concepts are subordinated to others
(Meyer 1999). Research over the past three decades has shown that knowledge of
text structure interacts with comprehension. This research has generally
focused on the areas of narratives and expository prose, approaching the
internal structure of each genre in different ways.
Narrative
A great deal of the research on text
structure has examined the narrative.
Graesscr. Golding, and Long (1996)
note that narrative discourse has a special status in research and theories of
discourse, language use, and literacy in general. People acquire knowledge of story
structure prior to school while the structure of expository text requires
explicit instruction and training. Further, narratives are read more quickly
than expository text, and scores on recall and Comprehension tests are
generally higher for NARRATIVE text than for expository texts. The Conceptual
basis for narratives lies in sequence& of experiences and events that are
based in a culture. This grounding provides a source of background knowledge
for use in constructing meaning (Graesser et al. 1996).
Narratives represent experiences
based on events that are organized in knowledge structures that can be predicted
by the reader. Several narrative prose studies have looked at schematic textual
superstructures (Rumelhart 1975; Van Dijk and Kinrsch 1983). This research has
shown that narratives have a rather hierarchical structure that can be used by
readers to aid Comprehension. According to Mulcahy and Samuels (1987), these
narrative text structures help identify, define, and explore the goals of a
protagonist and reveal the problem solving strategies of story characters as
they attempt to reach a goal' (748).
Several 'story grammars' have been
proposed to account for the internal structure that ties the individual
sentences within a narrative together (Mandler 1984; Mandler and Johnson 1977;
Rumelhart 1975; Thorndyke 1977; Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983). A story grammar is
design to present the story components such as setting and episode. Hierarchical
relationships that are represented by the story schema. A reader familiar with
the narrative schema will look for these components in processing the text and
they will guide the reader. The story grammar attempts to describe what
elements of a narrative will be most salient to readers, and, by implication,
what will be most and least comprehensible.
