Schema Theory in Reading

Schema Theory in Reading

1. I. DEFINITION OF SCHEMA

   • . Rumelhart (1980, P.34)
     • "a data structure for representing the genetic concepts stored in memory "
   • The fundamental tenet of schema theory
     • that written text does not carry meaning by itself.
   • organized in a hierarchical manner, with the most general at the top down to the most specific at the bottom.
   • Efficient comprehension requires the ability to relate the textual materialto one's own knowledge.
     • Reading comprehension
       • operates in two directions, from bottom up to the top and from the top down to the bottom of the hierarchy.
     • Bottom-up processing
       • is activated by specific data from the text
     • Top-down processing
       • starts with general to confirm these predictions.

2. IV. TEXT TYPES, TEXTS PATTERNS AND TEXT STRATEGIES

   • The text can be classified according to text-external criteria and the text-internal criteria.
     • Kinneavy (1980) grouped text into 3 parts starting from the discourse purpose: the expressive texts with the focus on the author, the persuasive texts with focus on the readers, and the inferential texts with the focus on the topics.
     • A text can be classified as an expository text, a descriptive text, a narrative text, an argumentative text, a persuasive text, an evaluative text, and a procedural text.
     • Claim-counterclaim pattern.
       • n this pattern, the author first raises a claim or opinion generally accepted or partly accepted, and thus puts forward his own claim or opinion to counter-claim.
     • Narrative pattern.
       • Labov (1972)'s narrative structural pattern. He summed up on the base of natural narrative order, six elements: abstraction, orientation, complicating events, evaluation, resolution, and coda.
     • Question-answer pattern.
       • Thee development of the text is mainly to search a satisfying answer to the question.
     • General-specific pattern.
       • In practical text, one pattern can occur independently, or combined with other patterns to form larger text.
   • Text strategies
     • Refers to the producer's general decision-making and choice of the text produced in the producing process.
       • In all, to abstract the text strategy in the discourse reading process not only can set a text strategy schema of a certain style step by step in the reader's mind,
       • Can help the readers decode macroscopically, efficiently and correctly. (Liu Chendan, 1999, p.145-154)

3. II. TYPES OF SCHEMATA

   • 1. Formal schemata (Relating to the rhetorical structure of the text.)
     • Background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical organizational structures of different types of texts" (Carrel and Eisterhold, 1983, p.79)
       • the knowledge of the ways in which different genres are presented
       • This underlying structure is known asformal schemata.
         • Stories consist of a setting in which the time, place, and characters are identified, followed byepisodes leading towards a reaction.
   • 3. Cultural schemata (more general aspects of cultural knowledge shared by larger sections of a cultural population)
     • Rivers and Temperly (1978, p.202) call cultural knowledge "socio-cultural meaning" which is "meaning which springs from shared experiences, values and attitudes".
     • Johnson (1981), and Carreli (1981)
       • Cultural background knowledge of content to make texts whose content is based onone's culture easier to read and understand than syntactically and rhetorically equivalent text based on a less familial-,more distant culture.
   • 2. Content schemata (relating to the content of a text read)
     • "background knowledge of the content area of the text" (Carreli and Eisterhold, 1983, p.80).
     • It contains conceptual knowledge or information about what usually happens within a certain topic.
     • It is an open-ended set of typical events and entities for a specific occasion.
   • 4. Linguistic schemata
     • Refers to the knowledge about vocabulary and grammar.
     • It plays a basic role in acomprehensive understanding of the text.
     • Eskey (1988, p. 94) claims that "good readers are both decoders andinterpreters of texts, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less important as their reading skill develops".

4. III. SCHEMA ACTIVATION AND INSTANTIATION IN READING

   • Schema Activation
     • Is generally recognized as the process in which some textual stimuli signal the direction or area for the reader to look for and evoke the relevant schema from memory into the present reading task (Li and Cheng, 1997, p.295-296).
     • One assumption about schema activation is that some words, or groups of words, or the title of a text, are highly suggestive and they can signal a certain schema.
   • Schemata Instation
     • Schemata instantiation refers to the particularized representation of the general abstract and stereotypical schemata which the reader brings to task.
       • The reader is involved in a process of constructing a correspondence between the relevant schemata and the givens or knows of a message.

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