Exploring the Influence of Content Schema on L2 Reading Comprehension A Case Study of Third Year EFL Students at Yahia Fares University, Medea

Abstract

Deemed as a skill with a didactic importance that falls in part with writing, listening and speaking, reading comprehension as being a tacit skill, that identifies with a number of cognitive processes, has long been sidelined with. Reading comprehension is a tacit knowledge that has concrete outcomes. This skill is suggested to be the process by means of which meanings are reconstructed by readers through drawing on their stored knowledge (Goodman, 1967). In this line of thought, schema theory (Bartlett, 1932) displays reading comprehension as being structured into cognitive schemes that are recognized as schemata. There are three types of schema: linguistic schema, formal schema, and content schema. This study is concerned with exploring the influence of content schema on L2 reading comprehension. In order to fulfill the aims of this study, we investigated the impact of the absence of content schema on L2 reading comprehension, as well as the effect of activating the appropriate content schema on students of English within LMD Algerian learning context. This investigation was carried out on data collected by virtue of a structured questionnaire and reading comprehension tests conducted with twenty (20) students of English in the Department of English at the University of Yahia Fares in Medea. The diversity of the employed methods rendered triangulation of the results possible, running to a cognitive-based gauging of reading comprehension. The aggregated data were submitted to a descriptive statistical analysis along with qualitative thematic analysis. The results of this study revealed that possessing the appropriate content schema influences L2 reading comprehension positively, while lacking the adequate schematic content knowledge obstructs comprehension. Additionally, this study found that the efficiency of activation procedures is determined by how developed the content schema of readers is.