The Role of Background Knowledge in Enhancing Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Reading comprehension is attained through successful interaction between the reader and the text. This interaction is the major factor that plays the most important role in comprehension. Accordingly, background knowledge will be of primary importance for EFL readers. So schema-based, pre-reading activities should be used for activating such background knowledge. It is assumed that prior knowledge activation requires pre-reading activities. The present study, aims at investigating the role of activating background knowledge in reading comprehension through text previewing. In this study a previewing strategy called THIEVES is used to verify this hypothesis. The researchers hypothesize that if students preview a text before reading it, they are likely to understand its content better. In order to investigate this, we conducted an experimental study using a t-test as a statistical measure of the data. We arrived at the conclusion that previewing a text through THIEVES as a prior knowledge activator -facilitates better comprehension. We found a positive correlation between previewing a text through THIEVES as a pre-reading activity (that aims to activate prior knowledge) and better reading comprehension.