An Experimental Study Of The Interactive Effects Of Content And Formal Schemata On Chinese EFL Learners' Text Comprehension

This study is to investigate, within a unified schema-theoretical framework of sociocognition, the effects of content and formal schemata on Chinese EFL learners'text comprehension, especially the interactive effects of these two kinds of schemata, in order to develop an alternative reading approach—SSRA (sociocognitive schematic reading approach). A sizable amount of studies has been done in schema reading theory, but my study is motivated by the unclear operational applications and the inconsistent results of those researchers and by the lack of empirical research on sociocognitive schematic influences on Chinese EFL readers. To achieve knowledge in this aspect, this study strives to see how schemata affect the comprehension and recall of Chinese EFL readers at the same language proficiency of the high-intermediate level in different recall conditions, and to see whether different structural levels and different cultural content idea units have different effects on the retention of the ideas of the text in the long-term memory by comparing the different results under the two recall conditions. And to integrate the interactive effects of content and formal schemata based on sociocognitive and schematic respects, the study is conducted to see how schemata operate, to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and schema theory, to look at the influence that schemata have on the reading comprehension of students as EFL learners, specifically those English majors from a China's university, to see how Chinese EFL learners make use of schemata when they read in English in sociocognitive and crosscultural context, and to see how we can help the students to activate the schemata stored in their mind to foster their comprehension with written discourse.For the aforementioned objectives, the study here conducts a three-experiment program to test the three types of effects of schemata on Chinese EFL readers based on the existing literature in the study of reading comprehension and schema theory, to assess the effectiveness of training students in activating and utilizing a schema as a text processing aid, and finally to set up a new text-processing approach—SSRA by investigating issues of the integrated socio-cognitive schematic effects on text comprehension cross culture. Specifically, the first experiment endeavors to identify the structure-specific effects on Chinese learners of English in text processing in general and then to explore how formal schemata influence the readers'recall of text in particular. The second one examines the effects resulting from content-oriented schemata, which can be verified via subjects'recall protocols. And the third one tries to investigate, within a unified socio-cognitive schematic framework, the interaction-focused effects both of content and formal schemata on Chinese EFL learners'reading comprehension in general, and testify the feasibility of extending and implementing the current results to providing pedagogical guidance for Chinese students learning to read English texts in particular.Sixty Chinese EFL undergraduate students participated in the study. A multi-factorial design was adopted. Subjects'data was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The findings obtained are: (1) The research primarily supports the fact that subjects who received a fairly lengthy training period of schema activation and utilisation outperformed those who did not receive that training both in reading comprehension and information recalled, and the fact that text organization appears to more facilitatively affect the recall of major ideas than that of minor details. (2) The significant correlations between the experimental performances and their other performances in EC (experimental class) exist. (3) The significant differences existing between EC and CC (control class) show the advantages of explicit training of subjects to be aware of and activate their preexisting content and formal schemata during their EFL reading. (4) Significant differences on both recall and question-answering obviously exist between a syntactically easier text and a syntactically more difficult text for subjects of high-intermediate-level proficiency in English as a foreign language. (5) Chinese EFL reading took place and could be practiced in different social and cultural contexts, and a study of these contexts can contribute to understanding the world schemata underlying the reading activities concerned. In short, this dissertation depicts my research exploration in incorporating schematic reading study in sociocognitive and crosscultural dimensions, which is an important step in expanding and enriching schema theory in the realm of EFL reading comprehension. The current research has important pedagogical implications for SLA, especially for English language teaching and learning in China.Due to the highly complicated and unpredictable nature of schematic text comprehension, this investigation still suffers from some limitations conceptually, methodologically and in other aspects. The possible designs of research in SL/FL are only limited by the ingenuity of the researcher and the conditions under which the research is being conducted. Therefore, recommendations to conduct further studies are put forward in order to facilitate a more consistent, coherent picture of EFL text comprehension and to elicit more generalizable conclusions from amalgamation of future results.