Delphi module

7.1.4
Schema theory

Reflective task 7

Read the following opening paragraph:
The prelude to Christmas and the dawn of the real new millennium produced little good cheer. In the subcontinent, life bans for Mohammad Azharuddin and Ajay Sharma, and continuing investigations by Sir Paul Condon's team of 'sleaze-busters' cast a pall every bit as bad as the evening smog in Faisalabad.

Can you guess what this text is about? Try reading the next section:
In England, Mark Ramprakash's search for pastures new, which seems to have been going on for ages, again made the tabloids. In Australia, West Indies suffered the humility of sound drubbings by the all-conquering Australians, despite the arrival on the scene of Brian Lara's new girlfriend. Even the hacks were involved in an outbreak of dog eating dog.

Any the wiser? If not, read the third paragraph:
In the case of the hackle-raising among the hacks, the Daily Telegraph's Michael Henderson was the prime player. Michael writes well, if not always with the keenest insight into the game. He speaks his mind and he should be admired for that. But his judgements are sometimes unnecessarily harsh. When his targets are players, such as Ian Salisbury or Graeme Hick, his views are tolerated at least by colleagues, although some may wish for a kinder way of describing failure. When he picks on a venerated former plier of the same trade as himself, no longer in a position to answer back, such as E. W. Swanton, the fur tends to fly. Several pieces in The Guardian and one in The Times gave Michael a fair old roasting.

If you still cannot work it out, read the fourth paragraph:
Stories that Henderson's original obituary of Swanton, written fittingly in his capacity as cricket correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, suffered a severe case of the spike may or may not be true. Certainly no appreciation under Henderson's by-line appeared. Since then, his determination to get his views into print have surfaced in the December issue of a cricket magazine (yes, there are others besides The Cricketer). The opportunity presented itself when a book, paying homage to Swanton, was published.

The chances are that, unless you are a cricket fan, it will have taken you up to here to realize the text is about cricket. Imagine, then, how much more difficult it would be for, say, a Chinese learner of English to make sense of the text. The text illustrates very well how background and 'inside' knowledge of a topic can radically change the experience of reading, a key issue for foreign language teachers to bear in mind when selecting texts.

Some of the most significant research into psycholinguistics and reading over the past 25 years has centred on the role which background knowledge or 'schemata' (singular 'schema') play in helping readers deal with larger units than those processed in slow, literal decoding. This is a topic which has major implications for the teaching of L2 reading. (See also Module 8, section 8.2.5, on 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' processing of texts.)

For a long time the sentence was considered by linguists and reading specialists to be the most important unit for linguistic description and analysis. The principal concern was with how readers associated the string of words (surface structure) with its semantic representation (deep structure). Gradually the focus of research has moved away from the sentence towards the way in which the reader contributes to the text and relates the knowledge encoded on the page to previously acquired knowledge. Schemata are cognitive structures which incorporate generalized knowledge about objects or events (Anderson et al,1978). As a reader processes a text, 'slots' within these structures are 'instantiated' or filled with information from the text. The schema that will be brought to bear on a particular text depends on the reader's 'primary cultural reference group' (Wilson and Anderson, 1986: 34), on his/her sex, race, religion, nationality and occupation. While reading, readers monitor their comprehension by seeking correspondences between what they know and what the written message tells them. However, if the readers' schemata are substantially different from the writer's, there is a danger they will misinterpret the passage, distort meaning and try to fit the text's propositions to their own schemata.

Effective readers, it has been established, deal with as large a linguistic unit as they can, processing phrases rather than individual words and often sentences rather than phrases. This 'chunking' of information and concepts which a well-developed schema makes possible, ensures more essential material enters long-term memory, while less essential material is discarded. The process causes the text's message to move in directions anticipated by readers, confirming their expectations of the text and providing reassurance. In this way, schemata not only promote faster reading, they also, more importantly, help readers to recall things they have read but forgotten.

It has also been suggested (Carrell, 1983b) that besides schemata relating to the content of texts, there are schemata for the form and structure of texts which provide knowledge of various types of rhetorical organization - for example, the normal ingredients of simple stories or folk tales, and other organizational conventions (see section 7.6); for an example of an exercise to exploit this, see Module 8, section 8.3.3).

Schemata have been shown to be crucial in L2 reading comprehension (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1983; Carrell, 1983a). Background knowledge, in particular, enhances global comprehension of L2 texts. However, with some L2 learners the required schemata for a lot of the texts they have to tackle may be either wholly absent or, at best, poorly developed - the result of a lack of experience of life in general, and of the foreign culture in particular. In order to avoid the resulting slowness in developing reading for meaning, or possible misinterpretation of a text's message and a consequent return to decoding, the teacher needs to establish background to the text, to help fill in inadequate schemata and to establish cultural context (see Module 8, sections 8.3.1 - 8.3.2).