The Influence of Background Knowledge on Memory for Reading Passages by Native and Nonnative Readers

Abstract

M Schema theory research has provided evidence of the importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Specifically, content are previously established patterns of background knowledge existing in the mind of a reader and are used to create meaning from text. During the reading process, selected new information from the text is related to old information acquired from the reader's previous world knowledge (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978). Through membership in a culture, an individual has privileged information which is represented in a rich system of schemata (Steffensen & Colker, 1982, p. 2). However, when the cultural backgrounds of the author and reader of a text differ, the reader may inappropriately instantiate (Adams & Bruce, 1982). The needed for reading comprehension in a second language (L2) are often nonexistent or contain information inaccurate for the L2 setting. That is, there is a mismatch between the background knowledge presupposed by the text and the background knowledge possessed by the reader (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983). Since the mid-1970s, a number of empirical studies on cross-cultural comprehension have been based on schema theory (e.g., Connor, 1984; Johnson, 1982; Lipson, 1983; Steffensen & Colker, 1982; Steffensen, JoagDev, & Anderson, 1979). In general, these studies have found that subjects read passages with native themes more rapidly than passages with nonnative themes. Subjects recall a greater amount of information from native reading and listening passages, produce more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passages, and generate more culturally biased distortions of the foreign passages. When portions of a foreign passage are familiar, there is significantly greater recall of the familiar portions than of the unfamiliar parts. The study reported here was designed to investigate whether the potential mismatch in background knowledge between text and reader might affect the placement of ESL students into remedial reading classes.