Title: Teaching Reading Skill Using Heuristic Technique through Schema Theory
Abstract: IntroductionTeaching reading skill is really a complicated mental activity and a thinking process to experience, predict, verify, and acknowledge information according to the readers' previous information, knowledge, and experience. It is said that to understand language, a reader must utilize direct and implicit information. Direct information refers to words written down, while implicit information includes knowledge of structures and words of a language in a text and knowledge of the discussed topic and certain experience. There are three phases in the development of the reading process: Bottom-Up Model, Top-Down Model, and Interactive Model.Bottom-up model came into being in the 1960s, which emphasizes that the readers, taking reading materials as information input, start from letters and word recognition and then combine information continuously to accomplish reading activity. This model highlights that reading must be done in a fixed sequence to get a word meaning gradually and readers comprehend the reading materials mainly by language knowledge. In this model, readers' implicit information, that is, one's knowledge and life experience, is neglected and one's active processing of information is not taken into consideration. Following this model, the teachers would concentrate mostly on words, sentence patterns, and grammatical knowledge related to the reading material, but pay little attention to relevant background knowledge when teaching reading.During the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Goodman (Peglar 2003) proposed a reading model based on psycholinguistics, named top-down model. The model takes concept theory as basis and points out that readers predict reading materials according to previous syntax and semantic knowledge and make confirmation and modification during the reading process. The model assumes that the reading process is based on readers' previous knowledge and is a circulating process of predicting, verifying, and confirming. Under the guidance of this model, the teachers would pay too much attention to the students' previous knowledge, that is, implicit information in the reading process, and overlook basic language knowledge teaching.In intensive reading, reading has a relationship with background knowledge in reading comprehension. According to Anderson et al. (1977), Every act of comprehension involves one's knowledge of the world as well. Reading comprehension is commonly known as an interactive mental process between a reader's linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the world, and knowledge about a given topic. Reading comprehension transfers a message from writer to reader. So, the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension is schema theory.There are a few advantages of schema theory. First, it helps the students to connect their ideas with past experience or background knowledge in reading a text. Second, it helps the students in understanding and interpreting new things based on the existing schema in mind. And third, it helps the students to understand not only things and experiences, but also the language describing these things and experiences, including written and spoken form.There are reasons why the students cannot understand a text. First, the students lack proper schema. Second, the students may possess adequate schema, but the author does not provide enough clues to activate the schema. Therefore, the students still cannot get the meaning. If an adequate clue is provided, the students can understand the text. Third, the students interpret the text in a consistent way, but deviate from the author's intention. The students may misunderstand the author's intention. So, it will be better if the students have the capability to interpret the author's intention deeply and also have better vocabulary to avoid misunderstanding the author's purpose or the information that is given by the author in a text.Schema TheoryThe concept of schema theory, one of the cognitivist learning theories, was first introduced in 1932 through the work of British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (some suggest it was first introduced in 1926 by Jean Piaget) and was further developed mostly in the 1970s by American educational psychologist Richard Anderson. …
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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