Schemata and Reading Comprehension

by Jose Luiz Meurer

Azran Azmee Kafia

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Outline

• Background • Notions• Schema Theory• Text organization • Schemata and inferencing• Context and activation of Schemata

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Background

Reader’s mind

distribution of information in the printed text

voluntary and automatic activation of information

pertinent background

knowledge+

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Background

• individual’s possession of world knowledge• innate capabilities of human mind (Kent, 1781)

Generalizedknowledge

Particularizedknowledge

Semantic memory Episodic memory(Tulving, 1972)

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Kent (1781)

Smaller unit of perception

(given objects)

Fixed Image

(given categories) Larger u

nit unitar

y

wholes

(Tringle Isosce

les)

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Bartlett (1932)A unitary Mass

Active and operating orderly behavior

Human being response to situations more or less analogically and automatically in terms of knowledge that has been accumulated by the ‘active organization of our past reaction’.

Bartlett concerned with the realm of effects of mental patterns.

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Piaget (1975)Theory of learning:

Human mindOrganization 1 Organization

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Human interacts with his Product of that

Environment and learnt from it interacion

Piaget calls it ‘functional invariants’.

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BackgroundCarrell (1983)

a) Formal Schemata b) Content Scemata

Rhetorically organized SementicDifferent genres content of texts

Narratives Content

Patterns representing the way experience and knowledge are organized in the mind.

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NotionsTop-down processing

Conceptually driven

Specific to general (Printed symbols to word, phrase...entire

text)

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NotionsBottom-up processing

Data driven

General to specific (in the mind of the reader,

sampling text info, hypotheses and

prediction about the text)

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NotionsStanovitch(1980)Interactive –compensatory Model

Top-down processing + Bottom-up processing

(Interactive)

Compensatory : If there is a deficit in any other particualr process, this deficit will be compensated by a heavier reliance on other knowledge sources.

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Reliance (If reliance can not too great on one source of knowledge at the expence of others.)

Predicting abilitiesCaught in the microstrcture and fail to creat

macrostuctural representation difficultand unfamiliar texts.

Then return to Formal schemata

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Schema Theory• To understand the interaction of key factors

affecting the comprehension process is a concept of Schema.

• Linguistic, congnitive psychology and psycholinistics have made the concerned studies.

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Schema Theory• Schema theory states that all knowledge is

organized into units, and these units of knowledge or schemata is stored information.

• Schemata represents knowledge about concepts.

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Text Organizartion Earlier Research• Text organization conincide with developlments

in schema theory.• Human minds shore frames or schemata for

sequential events or routinized situations .• Formal schemata for the structural or rhetorical

organization of different genres.

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Text Organizartion Recent Research• Readers perceiving the rhetorical structure used

by the author tend to perform better.• Different text organization from narrative to

expository shows difficulty recalling after reading.

• Top-down fashion helps to integrate lower level hierarchies of information in the text.

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Text Organizartion • Comprehention is more efficient.• When structural or formal schemata are not

activated, comprehension will depend on bottom-up process.

• The integration of the text will be more diffucult• So, lower performance in reading comprefension

is measured.

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Schemata and Inferencing• Inferencing is the apprehension of inoformation

that is not explicitly in a text.

The skill of identifying The skill of integratinginformation knowledge

• To reproduce literally information presented through print contains more’inferential implications’ than literal information.

(Brewer 1977)

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Schemata and Inferencing• An ‘inferential implication’ is a schema-based

response. • It’s a product of knowledge or schemata stored

in reader’s mind.Implications are triggered

Incoming info (text) Background knowledge

Bottom-up process Top-down process

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Schemata and InferencingTwo types of implications:a) Logical Implication: it’s a response implied by

an idea in the original passage.

b) Pragmatic Implication: it’s a response deriving from the text and according to our expections about the world but neither logically nor necessarily implied by the original passage.

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Context and activation of Schemata

• A context significantly influences reader’s understanding and recall of a written text.

• Context has been created bya) advance organizersb) a titlec) a pictured) a paragraph environment, etc.

Context is to activate higher order schemataa top-down processing

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Context and activation of Schemata

• Carrell and Wallace (1983) compared the effects of context on the reading performance of native speakers of English and non-native ESL readers.

Results:• a) for the natives the context has a

singnificant influence. • b) for ESL readers the context has no

singnificant influence.

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Context and activation of Schemata

Hudson’s study (1982)Three major components effects reading

comprehension:a) the linguistic componentb) the prior knowledge or Schemata componentc) the affective component

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Context and activation of Schemata

• Poor L1 or L2 reading performance is a reading problem or a linguistic problem.

• Poor reading seems to be the result of a breakdown at either the linguistic component or at the prior knowledge or schemata component.

• Linguistice component depends on bottom-up process, the text-based information.

• Schemata component depends on top-down processes, schema-based information.

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Conclusion

Comprehension is a consequence of the simultaneous activation of the two types of processes.