Content and Formal Schemata in ESL Reading

Abstract

This article reports the results of an experiment investigating the simultaneous effects on ESL reading comprehension of both culture-specific content schemata and formal schemata, as well as any potential interaction between them. In the study, highintermediate ESL students read, recalled, and answered questions about each of two texts. For each of two groups of readers (students of Muslim and Catholic/Spanish backgrounds), one text had culturally familiar content, the other culturally unfamiliar content. Within each group, one half of the subjects read the texts in a familiar, well-organized rhetorical format, the other half read the texts in an unfamiliar, altered rhetorical format. Results showed the conditions expected to yield good reading comprehension (familiar content, familiar rhetorical form) did so. Similarly, the conditions expected to yield poor reading comprehension (unfamiliar content, unfamiliar rhetorical form) did so. More interestingly, the results for the "mixed" conditions (familiar content, unfamiliar rhetorical form; unfamiliar content, familiar rhetorical form) indicated that content schemata affected reading comprehension to a greater extent than formal schemata. Specific results are presented and discussed, as are limitations of the study and teaching implications.One type of schema, or background knowledge, a reader brings to a text is a content schema, which is knowledge relative to the content domain of the text. Another type is a formal schema, or knowledge relative to the formal, rhetorical organizational structures of different types of texts.In empirical tests of these two different types of schemata, it is fairly easy to separate out and to test for the effects of one type, while holding the effects of the other type constant. For example, in testing for the effects of content schemata, one keeps the formal rhetorical structure of a text constant, manipulates the content, and has comparable groups of subjects process each different content. Any differences on the dependent measures (answers to literal or 461 inferential questions, written or oral recall protocols, summaries, and so on) are then presumed to be due to the manipulation of content and readers' background knowledge of that content.This type of research has in fact been typical in the field. The seminal study of Steffensen, Joag-dev, and Anderson (1979) is a good example of this type of cross-cultural research on content schemata. In that study, two groups of subjects with different cultural heritages were investigated-a group of Asian Indians living in the United States and a group of Americans. Each subject was asked to read and recall two personal letters, both of which were constructed with similar rhetorical organization. However, the cultural content of the two letters differed; one described a traditional Indian wedding, the other a traditional American wedding. It was assumed that all adult members of a society would have a well-developed system of background knowledge about the marriage customs of their own c...

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