Effects of preceding activities on reading of high school students at the practical high school ho chi minh city university of pedagogy

The findings revealed that the students a positive attitude toward reading comprehension and pre-reading activities as well as high frequency of pre-reading activity provision.. The read

VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY- HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

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EFFECTS OF PRECEDING ACTIVITIES ON READING

OF HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

AT THE PRACTICAL HIGH SCHOOL-

HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF PEDAGOGY

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (TESOL) Submitted by NGUYEÃN THÒ TUÙ

Supervisor

LEÂ THÒ THANH THU, Ed D

Ho Chi Minh City, 2005

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I certify that this thesis entitled “Effects of pre-reading activities on reading of high school students at the Practical High School- Ho Chi Minh City University

of Pedagogy” is my own work

This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution

Ho Chi Minh City, December 22, 2005

Nguyen Thi Tu

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first like to gratefully acknolwedge the invaluable and generous assistance given to me by my thesis supervisor, Dr Le Thi Thanh Thu, over the lengthy period of the researching and writing of the thesis I could not have finished this thesis without her encouragement and constant guidance

I am greatly indebted to all my teachers for their dedication and helpful instruction during the course

My special thanks to all those who helped me in the study, in particular,

Ms Hoang Thuy Nguyen, Ms Tran Thi Binh, for their help with the useful advice on the questionnaire and the tests and all the students in the study for their cooperation

Last but not least, thanks may be sent to my family To my parrents who devote all their lives to the children’s education

of Pedagogy to measure the influences of pre-reading activities on reading comprehension and suggests a way in which reading may be more effectively taught

Evidence was collected through a survey questionnnaire and an experiment of four tests given for test scores of 91 students T-test analysis tool then was used to help analyze the data collected from the questionnaires and the tests

The findings revealed that the students a positive attitude toward reading comprehension and pre-reading activities as well as high frequency of pre-reading activity provision

The reading activities investigated in the study, vocabulary teaching; pictorial context; pre-questioning ; and combined pre-reading activities,

pre-in general, have the positive effect on students’ readpre-ing comprehension The technique of combined pre-reading activities defines its meaningful superiority Vocabulary pre-teaching has the similar influence Pictorial context shows its positive effect Pre-questioning seems not to help students’ reading comprehension much

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Certificate of originality i

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii

Table of contents iv

List of tables viii

List of figures ix

Abbreviations x

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 BACKGROUND AND THE PROBLEM 1

1.1.1 Background 1

1.1.2 The problem 3

1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY AND OVERVIEW OF THE THESIS 6

6

1.2.1 Objective of the study 1.2.2 Research questions 6

1.2.3 Significance of the study 7

1.2.4 Organization of the remainder of the study 7

1.3 SUMMARY 8

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 9 MECHANISM OF READING 9

2.1

Reading as a process 9

2.1.1

11

2.1.1.1 Reading as a cognitive process

2.1.1.2 Reading as “bottom-up”, “top-down” and interactive

2.3 THE EFFECTS OF PRE-READING ACTIVITIES ON READING

COMPREHENSION 19

2.4 THE EFFECTS OF VOCABULARY PRE-TEACHING; PICTORIAL

CONTEXTS AND PRE-QUESTIONING ON READING COMPREHENSION

2.4.4 Pictorial Context and Reading Comprehension

2.5 RATIONALES FOR CHOOSING FOUR PASSAGES FOR TESTING 33 2.6 SUMMARY 37

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 38

3.1 RESEARCH DESIGN 38

3.2 THE MAIN STUDY 39

3.2.1 Subjects 39

3.2.2 Intruments 40

3.2.2.1 The pilot study 40

3.2.2.2 Test components 42

3.2.2.3 Questionnaires 44

3.2.3 Data collection procedures 45

3.2.3.1 Test and questionnaire administration 45

3.2.3.2 Coding and statictical analysis 47

CHAPTER 4: DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 49

4.1 QUESTIONNAIRE ANALYSIS 49

4.1.1 Responses to survey questionnaires 49

4.1.2 Summary 55

4.2 ANALYSIS OF TEST SCORES 56

4.2.1 Correlation between pre-reading and non pre-reading activity test scores 56

4.2.2 Descriptive statistics: Effect comparison between pre- reading activities 60

4.3 FINDINGS FROM QUESTIONNAIRES AND

TEST SCORES & IMPLICATIONS 63

4.3.1 Findings 63

4.3.2 Implications 65

CHAPTER 5: RECOMMENDATIONS 70

5.1 RECOMMENDATIONS 70

5.1.1 Recommendations for reading comprehension 70

5.1.2 Recommendations for high school reading teaching 72

5.2 LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 78

5.3 CONCLUSION 79

REFERENCES 80

APPENDIX 1 Four readings and tests given to students in the experiment 88

APPENDIX 2 Questionnaire (in Vietnamese translation) 99

APPENDIX 3 Questionnaire 103

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1 Factors involved in selecting an EFL reading passage 33

Table 3.1 The results of English in grade 11 39

Table 3.2 The Englist test result in the first semester of grade 12 39

Table 4.1 The importance of reading according to G1& G2 50

Table 4.2 The frequency of the subject students’ pre-reading activities 51 Table 4.3 The frequency of teachers’ pre-reading activities 52

Table 4.4 The benefits the subjects get from each pre-reading activity 54

Table 4.5 Students’ attitudes toward pre-reading activities 55

Table 5.1 Topics of grade 12 74

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1 Reading process 10

Figure 4.1 Reading test score of G1 and G2 for Vocabulary

pre-teaching of the passage “Mercury and the woodman” 56

Figure 4.2 Reading test score of G1 and G2 for Pictorial Context of

the passage “The perfect crime” 57

Figure 4.3 Reading test score of G1 and G2 for Pre-questioning of the

passage “ The Witch of the Wall street” 58

Figure 4.4 Reading test score of G1 and G2 for Combined reading

activities of the passage “ King Arthur and Robin Hood” 59

ABBREVIATIONS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

The study reported in this thesis examines the effects of providing reading activities on reading comprehension in the acquisition of a foreign language, particularly reading skills

The purpose of this introduction is to provide the background and to state the problem why pre-reading activities have to be seriously studied The introduction covers the following things:

1.1 BACKGROUND AND THE PROBLEM

1.1.1 Background

The Practical High School (PHS) - University of Pedagogy (UP) was

founded in 1999 It belongs to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) UP

There are 70 teachers teaching there, seven of whom are teachers of English These English teachers have the age from 25 to 32, one of whom is 43 Four teachers out of seven are following the Master course in the HCMC University of Social Sciences and Humanities and Victoria University One obtains PH.D in contrastive language The other two are Bachelors of Arts All of them graduated from HCMC UP- English department The teachers, in general, are motivated and always want to improve their teaching skills and getting more and more experience It can be said that they can adapt to the useful new ways of teaching English to help their students with studying English

There are 20 classes of grade 10, 11 and 12 with 724 students all-together Students entering the PHS got rather high marks when they took the secondary graduation examination, normally 55 out of 60 marks They have similar study level, in particular, English level Generally, they are active, hard-working and aware of the importance of good education

The course book used here are English 10, 11, and 12 edited by Tu and Ha (1995) approved by Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) which are obligatorily used in Vietnam high school syllabus, particularly in high schools in HCMC The extra course books comprise “Bai tap tieng Anh 10, 11, 12” written

by Mai and Nguyen (2001) and a book of reading and grammar designed by teachers handling the class

All the students in grade 10, 11 and 12 have to spend 4 periods a week learning the course book and do exercises in the extra course books They have

to take three tests of 45 minutes with all the students in each grade and many tests of 15 minutes They also have opportunities to take part in many extra activities The tests of 45 minutes are given according to the same format required by HCMC Education and Training Office with the emphasis on reading and writing In each test, 80 percent covers multiple choice items and 20 percent

of re-writing, in which 30% is about reading with two reading passages Students are asked to do multiple choices and true/ false/ not given exercises The tests are self-made by each teacher in each grade and are collected to make a complete test for all the students in each grade form It is, thus believed that reading and writing are paid much attention to Learning to read and teaching reading are the two great duties of teachers and students at the PHS

Students of grade 12, the participants in the study, who are accustomed to school regulations and teaching styles of their teachers, are rather good and motivated on the grounds that they are going to take a graduation exam in June English is a compulsory subject in that exam, so they have high esteem in studying English, particularly reading skills There are six classes of grade 12 with 230 students Only the students with the highest marks in the entrance examination and with the best results in grade 10 and 11 are arranged into class 12A1 Students in the other five classes, thus, have the similar study level

1.1.2 The problem

As considerably reading skill is paid attention to in the syllabus, there are still many discouraging and uninteresting reading classes That most of the reading classes at the PHS are said to be boring and sometimes unproductive is

an issue to be taken into great consideration

Some students said to me that they just wanted to sleep when they encountered long and difficult texts with thousands of words and words and the old ways of presenting the lesson of some teachers as “Open the book to page 34 and do the exercises” without any other activities to stimulate students to read The students assumed that the topics in the book were of their interest and they could learn from the content of the stories or the texts As I attended the reading classes handled by three different teachers at the PHS, the students in these classes complained that there were no new things They expressed their worry about learning reading and some reading classes without any interest and motivation

Obviously, a great number of the students at the PHS express the desire to read and write well in English Although their purposes in reading vary from

person to person, people still have something in common: “how to interpret and understand, respond the meanings of texts”

Thus, who is to blame in this situation? In my own opinion, it is not time to consider who takes the responsibility but to provide the students with the reading activities that are interesting, effective and useful to create their curiosity and enhance their cognition and thinking Why do not teachers take advantage of various kinds of pre-reading activities that can create the want and need to encourage them to read and bring them some new things when they encounter a certain text and when they are in the last grade to prepare for university education?

It is undeniable that reading is a complex activity that involves both perception and comprehension Reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected ideas in texts

Readers typically make use of background knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with the text, and other strategies to

help them understand written text

(Pang; Muaka; Bernhardt & Kamil, 2000:6)

It obviously stresses the importance of readers’ background knowledge in reading comprehension Many researchers and teachers have been studying and

conducting researches to find out ways to aid reading comprehension Many useful and interesting ways have been presented despite disagreements among researchers, one of which is to activate readers’ background knowledge The way we interpret depends on the schemata activated by the text and whether we interpret successfully depends on whether our schemata are sufficiently similar

to the writer’s If teachers want to activate and emphasize on students’ background knowledge and make students cooperate more actively and effectively, they have to carry out the preceding activities These preceding activities are proved to be considerably efficient in students’ reading comprehension

They can be named as pictorial context; vocabulary teaching; and questioning Three pre-reading techniques that seem most practical for English

pre-as foreign language learners are examined in the present study Two of the techniques, pictorial context and vocabulary pre-teaching, have been shown to improve comprehension of native speakers of English under some circumstances (Hudson, 1982) The third, pre-questioning, has earned some research support for both native and non-native speakers (Royer et al., 1984) Taglieber et al (1988) did a research on the effects of preceding activities on EFL Reading by Brazilian College Students They proved that these preceding activities- pictorial contexts, vocabulary pre-teaching; and pre-questioning had an enormous influence on students’ reading ability

One question arises here “Are these three preceding techniques useful and effective to high school students in the non-English environment –Vietnam, particularly high school students at the PHS- HCMC UP?”

The problem put forth here is to point out the effects of preceding activities

on EFL reading by high school students at the PHS- HCMC UP

1.2 AIM OF THE STUDY AND OVERVIEW OF THE THESIS

1.2.1 Objective of the study

The objective is to find out the effects of preceding activities (named

pictorial contexts, vocabulary pre-teaching and pre-questioning) on high school

students’ reading comprehension ability in order to suggest ways to improve students’ reading comprehension by providing preceding activities

1.2.2 Research questions

The study is guided by the question:

What is the effect of preceding activities on high school students’ English

reading at the PHS- HCMC UP?

In detail, the study will try to answer the following questions:

1 Do the students who receive the preceding activities comprehend better than those who do not receive these treatments?

2 Do students who receive a combination of three treatments comprehend better than only one type of treatment?

3 Are any of the treaments superior to the other?

4 What are students’ attitudes toward the treatments?

1.2.3 Significance of the study

Reading comprehension and grammar ability in foreign language are laid much emphasis at high schools in Vietnam, of course in HCMC, especially in the curriculum for English subject in grade 12 Teachers at several high schools sometimes focus on students’ linguistic knowledge and undervalue the content schematic knowledge, the knowledge of the world in teaching reading as well as students’ guessing and predicting abilities They, therefore, sometimes have not carried out any pre-reading activities to prepare for students to read and comprehend better, which limits students’ creation and thinking ability This study, thus, will serve as a critical report on this problem with deliberate recommendation for further teaching Those who may be interested in this study will find something useful and suplement to their understanding and awareness

of providing various, useful, appropriate and interesting pre-reading activities to activate students’ background knowledge and increase students’ thinking and even of the importance of widening teacher’s content schematic knowledge in preparation for more valuable experience and assistance Furthermore, teachers who are interested in teaching reading can refer to the study as a reference

1.2.4 Organization of the remainder of the study

Chapter II presents a review of the literature and research relevant to the study It will examine the theoretical and practical information in discussion of reading, preceding activities and the effects of preceding activities on reading comprehension It also covers rationale for choosing the four passages employed

in the study

Chapter III deals with methodology, research design (sampling, population, subjects, and instrumentation)

Chapter IV deals with data analysis and findings as well as implications

Chapter V presents recommendations for teaching and learning reading comprehension It also shows limitations of the study and suggestions for further research

1.3 SUMMARY

The chapter has described the current English teaching and learning reading

at the PHS-HCMC UP and the syllabus of the high school students serving as the background of the study The thesis aims to investigate the effect of pre-reading activities on reading comprehension The results hopefully can provide practical benefits to teachers and students in the teaching and learning of English reading

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 MECHANISM OF READING

2.1.1 Reading as a process

Learning to read is an important educational goal (Bernhardt, 2000; Kamil

& Pearson, 2000; Hulstijin, 1991) Various pedagogical purposes served by written texts help reading gain the special focus as the most important academic skill (Grabe & Stoller, 2002; Richards & Renanadya, 2002) Although many researchers have given reading a great number of definitions, it is not easy to define it The following is the three definitions of reading Reading is

“… the ability to draw meaning from the printed page and interpret this information appropriately”

(Grabe & Stoller, 2002:19)

“… the process of receiving and interpreting information encoded in language form in the medium of print.”

(Urquhart & Weir, 1988:22)

“…an active, fluent process which involves the reader and the reading materials in building meaning Meaning does not reside on the printed page, nor is it only in the reader.”

(Alderson, 1984:1)

Taking a look at these three definitions, we still find it difficult to know what reading really is In the review of the reading definitions of Anderson and Pearson (1988), the National Reading Pannel Reports (2000), reading

may be defined as the process of simultaneously extracting and

constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language Comprehension, thus, entails three elements They are the reader who is doing

the comprehending; the text that is to be comprehended and the activity in which

comprehension is a part

Brown (1994) also proves a similar definition of reading comprehension as

a holistic process of constructing meaning from written text through the

interaction of firstly, the knowledge the reader brings to the text, i.e., word

recognition ability, world knowledge, and knowledge of linguistic conventions; secondly, the reader's interpretation of the language that the writer used in constructing the text; and the situation in which the text is read On this point,

we come to understanding why reading is so difficult to understand This is because reading includes intricate processes, elements and skills, which differ according to tasks, purposes and language abilities Without knowing these elements independently, the concept of reading remains unclear Complicated

as reading comprehension abilities are, there is a set of common underlying processes that are activated when we read Grabe & Stoller (2002:20) showed

us a list of them:

Figure 2.1: Reading process

Lower-level process Higher-level process

Lexical access Text model of comprehension

The lower level processes represent the more automatic linguistic processes and are typically viewed as more skills orientated The higher level processes generally represent comprehension processes that make much more use of readers’ background knowledge and inferencing skills

Grabe & Stoller (2002:20)

2.1.1.1 Reading as a cognitive process

Many attempts have been made to define or describe the nature of reading

It is generally agreed that there are two broad aspects or levels First, there is a basically visual task, that of deciphering the marks on the page, the brain receiving signals from the eye This mechanical level includes eye movement, from left to right for English, to be learnt by a learner who does not use a left-to-right script in his first language, or who is illiterate in his first language Secondly, there is a cognitive task, that of interpreting the visual information, so that one is not simply “barking at print” Here we are concerned with thinking skills, since some kind of reconstruction takes place in the reader’s mind: he attempts to build up the meaning the writer had in mind when he wrote the whole text

In addition, Salataci & Akyel (2002) assumed that the process of extracting meaning gives us invaluable information about readers’ cognitive processes during reading Cognitive strategies aid the reader in constructing meaning from the text When readers are given cognitive strategy instruction, they gain significantly the measures of reading comprehension over students trained with conventional instruction One positive way of establishing a purpose for reading

is by focusing the learners’ attention on a particular cognitive skill In fact, a

2.1.1.2 Reading as a “bottom-up”, “top-down”, and interactive process

Wallace (2001) discussed the development of reading models and examined the role given to the reader in these models According to her, the role

of the reader changed in the 1980s and 1990s Reading was accepted as a passive skill in early accounts, then the role of the reader changed and was “… typically described as “extracting” meaning from a text” (Wallace 2001:22) Lately, reading has started to be described as interactive rather than simply being active Wallace defined the bottom-up model reader as passive, the top-down model reader as active, and the interactive model reader as interactive

Carell and Eisterhold (1983:84) pointed out “Bottom-up processing is evoked by the incoming data; the features of the data enter the system through the best fitting, bottom-up schemata Schemata hierarchically organized, from most general at the top to most specific at the bottom.” Bottom-up processing, thus, is a process where readers recognize and analyze perceived linguistic information like words and sentences and understand what a text means piece by piece with little interference of background knowledge Nunan (1999) also argued that the bottom-up approach views reading as a process of decoding written symbols into their aural equivalents in a linear fashion Thus, one first discriminates each letter as it is encountered, sounds these out, matching the written symbols with their aural equivalents, blends these together to form words and derives meaning Arriving at the meaning of a word is therefore the final step in the process

On the other hand, top-down or conceptually-driven processing is a process

in which readers who have expectations about text information which the text can confirm or reject and infer it by means of making use of their previous knowledge or experience in understanding a text Grabe and Stoller (2002) stressed that top-down models imply the fact that reading is primarily directed by reader goals and expectations Top-down approaches emphasize the importance

of schemata, and the reader’s contribution, to the incoming text (Alderson 2000)

It owes much to the work of Goodman (1971,1996), who emphasized in their writings the importance of the contribution made by the reader to the reading process

A top-down approach- a holistic approach- to language regards all levels of language as a whole, working together, while a bottom-up approach- an atomistic approach- divides communication into discrete levels, which can be dealt with separately Thus, bottom-up approaches view reading as a series of stages that proceed in a fixed order from sensory input to comprehension and top-down approaches view the interpretation process as a continuum of changing hypotheses about the incoming information Many researchers attempt to contrast the two approaches and try to persuade others whether the true starting point for the reading process is bottom-up or top-down (Eskey & Grabe, 1988) Reading as a bottom-up process is seen as the reader’s perception of graphemes, words, sentences, paragraphs and so on; and on the other hand as a top-down process, the reader has a scheme or general idea before starting to read derived from previous experience (Parry, 1987) More recently, approaches that take an interactive view of reading require an integration and combination of both top-

down and bottom-up approaches to describe the reading process The interactive

nature of the reading process has been described and studied for the past two decades by many researchers in this field such as Stanovich (1981); Brown (1994); Carrell et al (2000) Since top-down and bottom-up processing take place simultaneously- the reader needs to recruit his or her prior knowledge and prior experience, apply knowledge of writing conventions, and consider the purpose of reading in order to engage in top-down processing

2.1.2 Reader’s process of comprehending a text

Carell et al (2000) assumed that reading is a receptive language process It is

a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader constructs There is

an essential interaction between language and thougt in reading The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to thought As readers move through the cycles of reading they employ five processes The brain is the organ of information processing It decides what tasks it must handle, what information is available, what strategies it must employ, which input channels to use, and where to seek information The brain seeks to maximize information it acquires and minimize effort and energy used to acquire it The five processes it employs in reading are recognition-initiation; prediction; confirmation; correction and termination

In recognition-initiation, the brain must recognize a graphic display in the visual field as written language and initiate reading Normally this would occur once in each reading activity, though it’s possible for reading to be interrupted by other pictures, for example, and then to be reinitiated When the reader comes to

prediction, the brain is always anticipating and predicting as it seeks order and significance in sensory inputs If the brain predicts, it must also seek to verify its predictions So it monitors to confirm or disconfirm with subsequent input what it expected Then the brain reprocesses when it finds inconsistencies or its predictions are disconfirmed in the correction process Finally the brain terminates the reading when the reading task is completed, but termination may occur for other reasons: the task is non-productive; little meaning is being constructed, or the meaning is already known, or the story is uninteresting or the reader finds it inappropriate for the particular purpose At any rate, termination

in reading is usually an open option at any point These processes have an intrinsic sequence Prediction precedes confirmation which preceded correction Yet the same information may be used to confirm a prio prediction and to make a new one In addition, Grellet (1981) also suggests that reading is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it This is why, from the very beginning, the students should be taught to use what they know to understand unknown elements, whether these are ideas or simple words This is best achieved through a global approach to the text

Chart 1: A global approach to the text

+

Study of the layout: Æ Making hypotheses Anticipation of where

title, length, about the contents to look for confirmation

pictures, typeface and function of these hypotheses

of the text according to what one

knows of such text types

È Second reading Å Further Å Confirmation Skimming Å

for more detail prediction or revision of through the

one’s guesses passage

(Grellet 1981: 192)

Thus, in a sense, reading can be seen as a psycholinguistic guessing game

in which the reader reconstructs, as well as he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display (Goodman, 1971) In order to achieve comprehension, learners have to activate their background knowledge and cognitive ability as greatly as possible Schema theory, studied in 1930s by Barlett, places a heavy emphasis on the readers’ background knowledge and the way they use their cognition in intepreting the text (Barlett, 1932)

2.2 SCHEMA THEORY

2.2.1 Definition

The term “schema” was just used by the psychologist Bartlett (1932), and has had an important influence on researchers in the areas of speech processing and language comprehension ever since Bartlett (1932) argued that the knowledge we carry around in our heads is organized into interrelated patterns called schema They are like stereotypical mental scripts or scenarios of situations and events, built up from numerous experiences of similar events During the course of our lives, we build up literally hundreds of mental schema and they help us make sense of the many situations we find ourselves in during the day

2.2.2 Schema theory and reading comprehension

It is beyond doubt that the nature of the knowledge that readers have will influence not only what they remember of the text, but the product- their understanding of the text- and the way they process it This has become clear

Schema theory suggested that our knowledge and expectations about the world will strongly affect our ability to understand new information (Nunan, 1999) Not surprisingly, a great deal of research with both first and second language readers has been carried out using schema theory Reading comprehension is an interactive process between the reader and the text, in which the reader is required to fit the clues provided in the text to his or her own background knowledge

Guyotte (1997) found that content knowledge had a significant effect on the ability of the subjects to identify logical relationships in the test passage Richards (1990) presented research in a second language-reading classroom Richards pointed out the principles which capture the essence of effective instruction, one of which is

The teacher has a comprehensive theory of the nature of reading in

a second or foreign language, and refers to this in planning his teaching,

i.e., the teacher used knowledge of L2 reading strategies, schema theory

and the role of background knowledge rather than “common sense” to

select learning experiences

Cook (1989: 69) stated “the mind stimulated by key words or phrases in the text or by the context activates a knowledge schema.” Cook (1989) implied that

we are not necessarily dealing with conscious processes, but rather with automatic cognitive responses given to external stimuli This view clarifies that schemata are activated in one of two ways The first one is that new information

In both cases, the individual is piecing bits of knowledge together, attempting to make sense of them It follows that the main features of schemata are flexibility and creativity Schemata are flexible in that they undergo a cyclic process within which changes are brought about actively and economically, i.e., information is stored in memory and provided when needed with the least amount of effort They are creative in that they can be used to represent all types

of experiences and knowledge, i.e., they are specific to what is being perceived

Carrell and Floyd (1989) maintained that an English as second or foreign language teacher must provide the student with appropriate schemata she/he is lacking, and must also teach the student how to build bridges between existing knowledge and new knowledge Accordingly, the building of bridges between a student’s existing knowledge and new knowledge needed for text comprehension A number of organized pre-reading approaches and methods have been proposed in the literature for facilitating reading through activation of background knowledge Rumelhart and Ortony (1977) also concluded that the provision of vicarious or real experiences would fill in or expand the readers’ existing culturally determined background knowledge of a topic and would prepare them to comprehend and retain material on that topic in the reading passage that followed One way to activate background knowledge when the learners encounter a text and to improve the main features of schemata- flexibility and creativity- in learners is to provide them with pre-reading activities

2.3 THE EFFECTS OF PRE-READING ACTIVITIES ON READING COMPREHENSION

As we mentioned before, reading is a meaning-making process It is an active, constructive, creative, higher-thinking activity that involves distinctive cognitive strategies Furthermore, schema theory requires schema activation or background knowledge support before starting to read in order to comprehend the text better, reading activities play a key role in schema theory reading models (Demiriz 1998) Ur (1996) divided reading activities into three subcategories Pre-, While- and Post-reading Each stage possesses its own significance and undoubtedly, there is always a close and reciprocal relation among the three In the present study, pre-reading stage is to be paid much attention

The purpose of pre-reading activities is to motivate the students to want to read the assignment and to prepare them to be able to read it Because the major emphasis in the past has been on the product rather than the process, the teacher

is assuming that meaning resides in the reading itself Too often, pre-reading preparation has consisted little more than the following: “Tomorrow’s reading is really interesting! Read the whole text, page 32 to 38, and write in complete sentences the answer to the questions on page 39.” A quick analysis of this assignment reveals that it is based on certain assumptions that reading experts are currently questioning The teacher is assuming that students know the vocabulary and grammar and they are already prepared to read the text In such

an approach to reading, the ultimate pre-reading activities may include word

Saricoban (2002) also argued that language preparation does not mean that the teacher should explain everything every possible word and the structure in the text, but that he should ensure that the learners would be able to tackle the text without being very frustrated with language difficulties

Kamil and Pearson (2000) called pre-reading activities enabling activities, because they provide a reader with necessary background to organize activity and to comprehend the material These experiences involve understanding the purpose for reading and building a knowledge base necessary for dealing with the content and the structure of the material They say that pre-reading activities elicit prior knowledge, build background, and focus attention The overriding aim in doing any class work with our learners before they begin to read a text is

to create a positive attitude in their minds towards the text to be read A reading activity with the focus on arousing interest in a text and getting students started reading will be different from one with the focus on establishing a common understanding about the main idea or technique employed in a text Teachers need to consider how to initiate the reading of any text One way of stimulating interest and understanding their lacking points is to spend at least one or more lesson hours in this stage for arousing curiosity about the subject, message, characters and actions in the text (Greenwood, 1989)

Lewis and Hill (1985) recommended that language teachers should encourage learners to evaluate what they read Pre-reading activities may help the teacher to facilitate this If the readers do not have sufficient background

, therefore, help students’ comprehension (Carrell and Eisterhold 1983; Grabe 1991; Ur 1996)

To cut it short, the pre-reading stage attempts to improve students’ interest

in the topic and to motivate them In addition, it also aims at forming a purpose for reading and prepare students for the content of the reading passage One important thing is that this stage is meant to activate background knowledge and make connections; i.e., to build a bridge between the reading passage and the learner’s background and interest Students, therefore, take some time before the text to activate prior knowledge; preview the passage; make predictions; establish a purpose; as well as generate questions The teacher handling the reading classroom can do a lot of things They can assess students’ background knowledge of the topic and linguistic content of the text or give students the background knowledge necessary for comprehension of the text, or activate the existing knowledge that the students possess Furthermore, they are able to clarify any cultural information which may be necessary to comprehend the text

as well as make students aware of the type of the text they will be reading and the purposes for reading Providing opportunities for group or collaborative work and for class discussion activities should be taken into consideration The teacher, therefore, plays an essential role in carrying the following sample pre-reading activities during pre-reading stage if they want to help students achieve comprehension They can take advantage of the title, subtitles, and divisions within the text to predict content and organization or sequence of information One more thing to do is to ask students to look at pictures, maps, diagrams, or

Various techniques can be made use of in pre-reading stage Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages; and certainly the appropriateness according to a particular reading passage Among the above activities are “Vocabulary pre-teaching”; “Presenting pictures before a text” (or Pictorial Context); and Pre-questioning which are mainly mentioned What are the effects of these techniques? A lot of research concerning these three kinds of pre-reading activities has been done

2.4 THE EFFECTIVENESS OF VOCABULARY PRE-TEACHING; PICTORIAL CONTEXTS AND PRE-QUESTIONING ON READING COMPREHENSION

2.4.1 Students’ difficulties in reading comprehension:

Steffensen et al (1979) and Yorio (1972) concluded about the difficulties

of second or foreign students in reading comprehension They can be counted as lack of vocabulary knowledge; difficulty in using language cues to meaning and lack of conceptual knowledge They also state that the three pre-reading

activities named vocabulary pre-teaching; pictorial context and pre-questioning

can help students to overcome three major problems mentioned above

Limited vocabulary knowledge occasionally results in readers stopping to identify unfamiliar words and disrupts comprehension This is also a problem with first language readers, particularly those with decoding problems (Samuels, 1977) Limited vocabulary knowledge also leads to uneffective reading comprehension when the meaning of a sentence or paragraph turns on knowledge of certain words Pre-teaching vocabulary may help solve these problems in a certain extent

The second problem involves what Yorio (1972) calls the “triple process”

of recalling syntactic cues, making associations, and predicting future cues, a process that L1 readers perform automatically (Goodman, 1971) EFL learners, due to interference from unfamiliar words and grammatical patterns, find it difficult simultaneously to remember earlier textual information, predict what is coming, and connect phrase and sentence meanings The pre-reading activities

of providing pictures and pre-questioning help students make predictions about content that may assist them in resolving meaning problems when the syntax interferes

The third major problem, lack of conceptual knowledge, is also common to the first language readers According to Anderson & Pearson (1988), the message of a text can be distorted if there is insufficient correspondence between the schemata contained in the text and the schemata by which the reader assimilates the text Such distortion can happen particularly when readers

do not share the writer’s culture, beliefs, and assumptions This problem can seriously interfere with EFL readers’ comprehension The pre-reading activity of pictures, in particular, may help reduce some of these distortions

Pre-reading activities are intended to activate appropriate knowledge structures or provide knowledge that the reader lacks EFL readers’ comprehension also depends on their schemata (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983) If these readers are faced with highly unfamiliar content, particularly materials with many culturally loaded concepts, comprehension will be difficult, if not impossible, because the readers lack appropriate background knowledge (Hudson, 1982; Johnson, 1982; Steffensen at al., 1979)

It appears that when readers lack the prior knowledge necessary to read, three major instructional interventions need to be considered The first is to teach vocabulary as a pre-reading step; the second is to provide experiences; and the third one is to introduce a conceptual framework that will enable students to build appropriate background for themselves Good text preparation involves introduction; pre-questions and vocabulary In introduction, the teacher gives a brief (two or three sentences) introduction to the content of the text and help students to bring to mind vocabulary and ideas which will occur in the text In addition, pre-questions are comprehension questions asked before the students read the text They help students understand the text by focusing attention on key words and ideas Two or three pre-questions are enough These questions should follow the main story line or line of argument in the text and be in the correct sequence They are intended to indicate the basic structure of the text, and help students’ anticipation In this way, they make the reading of the text more natural When the students encounter a reading passage, teachers sometimes pre-teach certain new words which occur in the text This can be helpful, particularly if one or two words which are known to be new occur frequently in

2.4.2 Pre-questioning and Reading Comprehension

In the last several decades, theories and models of reading have changed, from seeing reading as primarily receptive processes from text to reader to interactive processes between the reader and the text (Adams, 1990; Eskey & Grabe, 1988; Perfetti, 1985; Samuels, 1977; Stanovich, 1981; and Swaffar, 1988) Approaches to the teaching of foreign language reading have attempted to reflect this development through interactive exercises and tasks The use of questions is an integral aspect of such activities Asking questions is an important strategy to use before, during and after reading to enhance interest and comprehension Effective questions encourage real thinking, not just yes or no answers Questions before reading should help the reader make connections between background knowledge and the topic of the book; set a purpose for reading as well as make predictions

Grellet (1981), who was in favor of this, also stated that we start reading the text prepared to find a number of things in it, expecting to find answers to a number of questions and specific information or ideas we are interested in This

“expectation” is inherent in the process of reading which is a permanent interrelationship between the reader and the text When reading, we keep making predictions which, in their turn, will be confirmed or corrected This underlines the artificiality of the classroom situation in which students are often confronted with passages they know nothing about, do not and cannot situate in a

Similar to the pre-posed questions advocated by Singer and Dolan (1982) for teaching active reading to children, pre-questioning is taught by having the instructor ask questions about a passage and the students answer with new questions Through pre-questioning, students set purposes for reading and ask questions whose answers require understanding the text The method is supported by research in both L1 reading (Singer & Donlan, 1982) and

in foreign language reading (Royer et al., 1984)

Sequero (1998) suggested a ready-made reading class He was confident that WFR (Warming-up For Reading) activity can be used extensively with any text, audience, and level In the worksheet of WFR, students are asked to write questions in English which they think they will find answers in the text based on the title given The role of each student is to participate actively, writing questions and predicting This activity is designed to be student-centered The students take the responsibility for their own learning processes “The most valuable information is in our students’ perceptions and not our own” (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1983:88) Saricoban (2002) also was in favor of critical pre-reading activities in which students’ question generation about the text before they read the text is mentioned The research on engaging students in the process of generating questions about the texts they read, although no definitive,

is generally positive and encouraging

Chia (2001) showed his opinion that questioning is an important type of top-down processing activity Questions may be generated by the teacher or by the students and should be done before reading, rather than after the reading

students can, therefore organize their existing knowledge which can verified and falsified by the other students during the subsequent reading of the text Alternatively, students can state their own opinions as the basis of a pre-reading “agree/disagree” task rather than do ready-made pre-reading tasks

2.4.3 Vocabulary Pre-teaching and Reading Comprehension

During the past twenty yeas or so, lexical researchers have concluded that there is a significantly robust and positive relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, because, they claim, knowing a word means possessing a certain degree of phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and collocation knowledge of a word (Alderson, 2000) However, the relation between them may freeze or decrease at a certain word level Recently, several researchers, and teachers have been eager to know more about the extent to which reading comprehension relies upon vocabulary knowledge Gravers et al (1998), Hulstijn and Bossers (1992) declared L2 readers’ vocabulary knowledge can predict between 28%-58% of their reading comprehension Laufer (1992) conducted a study to investigate the relationship between a threshold of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension Her outcomes showed that participants who remembered 3.000 word families could recall about 56% reading comprehension score, and this increased by 7% for every further 1,000 word families Another experimental study by Laufer (1989) showed that when an EFL reader’s vocabulary size exceeded 95% coverage of lexicons in a reading text, the loading of guessing the unfamiliar words would decrease and they could effectively achieve more appropriate comprehension Founded on Laufer’s results, Chen and Graves (1995) also

In addition, ESL readers need "a massive receptive vocabulary that is rapidly, accurately and automatically accessed" (Grabe 1991: 63) Carrell (1988b: 244) suggests a "parallel" approach

in which vocabulary and schemata are developed by "pre-teaching vocabulary and background knowledge concurrently for sets of passages to be read at some later time." Stanovich (1981: 247) talks about the reciprocal links between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension

….vocabulary is the glue that holds stories, ideas, and content together…making comprehension accessible for students

Nikolova (2004) also concluded that foreign language vocabulary plays an important role in achieving high-level reading ability and enhancing comprehension Anderson & Freebody (1981); Ruddell (1997) draw similar conclusions One way in which teachers can encourage the acquisition of new lexis is through the use of pre-reading activities that highlight vocabulary in the text Previewing can increase the salience of target vocabulary, ensure more repetition in terms of input and possibly output, and allow learners to meet lexis

in both partially decontextualized and fully contextualized settings, a combination which has been found conductive to acquisition (Zimmerman, 1997)

Pre-teaching vocabulary (to increase learning from text materials) probably requires that the words to be taught must be key words in the target passages (Kameenui et al., 1982), that words be taught in semantically and topically related sets so that word meaning and background knowledge improve concurrently, and that only a few words be taught per lesson and per week To be

an effective strategy, an extensive and long-term vocabulary strand accompanying a parallel schematic or background-knowledge-development strand is probably called for

In sum, most teaching accepts that some sort of preparation for the introduction of new words in a lesson is a good idea (McCarthy, 1990) This corresponds not only to a practical need for some sort of focus and formalization

to the content of the lesson, but also to a sound theoretical standpoint which says that new knowledge is most efficiently absorbed when it is assimilated to the already known, and when the appropriate conceptual frameworks or schemata are activated in the mind of the learner

2.4.4 Pictorial Context and Reading Comprehension

Wright (1987) also assumed that for many years reading in a foreign language classroom was limited to translation work and listening to the foreign language was incidental to other classroom acitvities In recent times, methodology has changed to encourage the development of a wider range of receptive skills This broadening of the scope of classroom practice has been reflected in the growing variety of teaching techniques employed The use of pictures should be seen against this richer and more varied methodological background With exercises designed to develop particular skills in reading,