Chapter 5 - Schema theory and ESL reading pedagogy

Summary

Every act of comprehension involves one's knowledge of the world as well.

(Anderson et al. 1977:369)

The idea expressed by the above quote is certainly not new, but it is one worth reminding ourselves of when we consider comprehension in a second or foreign language, and specifically reading comprehension in EFL/ESL. If, as Immanuel Kant claimed as long ago as 1781, new information, new concepts, new ideas can have meaning only when they can be related to something the individual already knows (Kant 1781/ 1963), this applies as much to second language comprehension as it does to comprehension in one's native language. Yet, traditionally in the study of second language comprehension (as much as, if not more so than, in the study of first language comprehension), the emphasis has been almost exclusively on the language to be comprehended and not on the comprehender (listener or reader). In this perspective, each word, each wellformed sentence, and every well-formed text passage is said to “have” a meaning. Meaning is often conceived to be “in” the utterance or text, to have a separate, independent existence from both the speaker or writer and the listener or reader. Also in this view, failures to comprehend a nondefective communication are always attributed to language-specific deficits – perhaps a word was not in the reader's vocabulary, a rule of grammar was misapplied, an anaphoric cohesive tie was improperly coordinated, and so on.