Effects of Schemata on Petra University Students ’ Reading Discourse

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of providing background information on students’ discourse of “Before Their Time” and “The Lottery” texts. The writer assigned these two short stories at intermediate readability level to 40 freshman and Sophomore students, chosen at random and divided into four groups. Each group was exposed to two treatment conditions. The two conditions were (a) providing background information necessary for understanding the upcoming texts, (b) a control condition in which no pre-reading instruction was provided. Results on multiple-choice tests showed strong positive effects of the background knowledge treatment; whereas students’ responses to attitude questionnaire showed they generally respond positively to the experimental treatments. In fact the findings give a limited support for the background knowledge treatment. A large percentage of students indicated they would have explanations of difficult vocabulary, description of the characters of the stories, and some background information to better understand and enjoy the stories. The implications of the findings should encourage EFL teachers to give some background information to assist students in reading. Also the data from the two studies support the hypothesized facilitation of getting the students acquainted with western schemata, the better understanding of the texts given.. A review of the literature in EFL/ESL methodology shows that the role of cultural knowledge as a factor in reading comprehension has been as issue for some time. Fries (1963) talked about meaning at the social-cultural level –that is, the meaning goes beyond the language code and is related to the background knowledge of the native speakers of that code. Reading comprehension occurs when the total meaning of a passage is fitted into this network of information, organized in ways meaningful to a society. The following passage from an ESL reading text illustrated Fries’ concept of social cultural meaning: