The Compensation Of Academic Background Knowledge To English Reading For Academics Purposes

Reading is one of the most striking skills in language acquisition, and playing an important role in the English learning. The concepts of reading have changed more in these years, it was thought as a decoding process originally, and the reader's comprehension was ignored completely in this process. Goodman (1967) was first one who described reading as a"psycholinguistic guessing game", and this game related to the relationship between the thinking and language. The schemata theory of modern psychology thought that the reading is the interactive process of readers'background knowledge and the article content. The role of background knowledge in the reading comprehension has been widely recognized, researchers both home and abroad have been carrying on it from different perspectives.The three models of English reading comprehension also applied to English for Academic Purpose Reading, especially the interactive models playing an important role in the English reading teaching. This model purposed that an interaction of both bottom-up and top-down processing working together simultaneously in comprehending a text. It emphasizes both on less-skilled decoding ability and high skilled using schemata knowledge, and the interaction between readers and passages. English for Academic Purpose reading is an interaction between knowledge of English language and academic background. To non-English major students of college, the academic background knowledge plays an important role in the EAP reading.The researchers of Linguistic Threshold Theory thought that once reader's second language proficiency reach a certain level their native proficiency can transfer to second language. The focus of this paper is whether the readers'academic background knowledge will occur transfer and compensation under any circumstances.The junior of the college were selected as participants, one group is English major students and another is Chemistry Engineering major. The English major students have higher L2 proficiency; the Chemistry Engineering students have strong academic background knowledge. After the L2 proficiency test, the researcher have found that the results of English major'better than Chemistry Engineering students'. After analyzed the results of low specific test, the researcher found the English major students'scores were higher than Chemistry Engineering students'. On the contrary, the Chemistry Engineering students'scores were higher than English major students'. Based on this, some answers were addressed in the present study1. In the EAP reading, the reading materials are highly specific, the readers have stronger academic background knowledge, the lower of L2 proficiency will be.2. In the EAP reading, the reading materials are lower specific, the readers academic background knowledge cannot compensate the L2 proficiency lacking.3. Only the background knowledge cannot ensure the EAP reading succeed, the L2 proficiency should reach a certain level.This paper consists of six main parts. The first part mainly introduces the significance of research, questions and methods. The second part main reviews the concepts, hypotheses and previous study. The third part main introduces the theoretical framework of schemata and interactive compensatory model. The fourth part presents the experiments in this study, including hypotheses, participants and procedure. The fifth part main analysis the data and give s the discussion. The sixth part explores the implications of this study and gives the limitation.