Effects of content and formal schema on reading comprehension

내용과 형식 스키마가 독해에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of content and formal schema on reading comprehension. Five hundred fiftynine subjects from high school were assigned to one of the following levels and treatment conditions : (1) Higher level & Schema Activation, (2) Higher level & Non-schema Activation, (3) Lower level & Schema Activation, and (4) Lower level & Non-schema Activation. To evaluate the effects of schema activation. two experiments were conducted : one was related to the content schema and the other to the formal schema. To evaluate the effects of content schema, three different types of tests were conducted : (1) cloze test, (2) guessing the meanings of nonsense words, and (3) immediate recall test. To evaluate the effects of formal schema instruction, four kinds of tests were conducted : (1) sorting the sentences according to the importance, (2) identifying the signal words, (3) immediate recall test, and (4) identifying the specific information. For content schema condition, results indicated that the subjects given the titles or pictures before reading in "Content Schema Activation" treatment had better grades than those of the other treatment in all types of tests. regardless of their levels. Schema activation helped the subjects to increase the cognitive predictability of missing words and to participate in the tasks more actively with risk-taking. And it was also shown that good readers tend to process the words meaningfully, while poor readers tend to process the words phonetically or morphologically. Formal schema activation through teaching the text organization also had a significant influence on three types of tests: sorting the sentences according to the importance, identifying the signal words, and immediate recall test, but not on identifying the specific information. The implications from this study can be briefly noted as follows : (l) In teaching reading, the student's background knowledge should be activated as a pre-reading activity. (2) In reading, it is more important to emphasize the student's schema than the features of the text. (3) Various educational interventions should be introduced, especially for the lower level students. (4) Teaching text structures can be a powerful method for the top-down processing strategy.