The Effects Of Advance Organizers On Reading Comprehension

The concept of schema first appears in philosophy and psychology. It describes how one' s acquired knowledge is retained in his brain and how it formalizes a complete information system in its correlation. While comprehending a new thing, one has to connect it with his prior knowledge and his past experience. Therefore, the understanding and recognition of a new thing relies in part on the formalized schema in his brain.With the development of cognitive science, the schema theory is also applied to explaining the process of language acquisition with which cognition is closely related, especially the process of reading comprehension. Hence a new theory of reading --- the schematic theory of reading emerges. On the basis of assimilating research results achieved by cognitive psychologists, the theory remedies a deficiency in traditional text-driven approach to reading and interprets the reading process as the one of interaction between background knowledge and reading material. In this view, the reader must utilize his previously acquired background knowledge to predict, judge and correct the intended meaning while decoding the reading material. Both are indispensable. Background knowledge not only helps to decode and assimilate new information, but also remedies a deficiency in his language ability. Otherwise, one might fail to understand the material without background knowledge.The schema theory provides reading research and languageteaching with scientific theoretical basis and practical guidance. Pedagogical researchers have gradually realized that the reader must be equipped with relevant background knowledge and applies it to the reading process in order to improve the reading quality. Under the guidance of this perspective, Ausubel first raised the concept of Advance Organizer in the early I960' s, suggesting that the reader be provided with needed background knowledge in its verbal form prior to reading. He himself proved advance organizer to be effective and feasible by empirical studies. His followers further develop the notion of advance organizer and, according to the different roles it plays in eliciting relevant information, reclassify it into two main types: the provider and the activator. As their names indicate, the former is to provide new schemata while the latter is to activate existing schemata.The present paper reports a study of the effects of both provider and activator on the reading comprehension of Chinese EFL students. The study is carried out with the aim of examining the interaction of background knowledge and linguistic proficiency in reading. Research results indicate that advance organizers, either provider or activator, produce a facilitative effect on the subjects' performance in reading comprehension. However, the activator' s effect is more pronounced than that of the provider by comparison. And background knowledge plays a more important role in reading than linguistic proficiency, and both do not have an interactive effect.