EFL teachers’ perceptions towards schema activation in English reading comprehension

EFL teachers’ perceptions towards schema activation in English reading comprehension

To Thi Ngoc Huyen ttnhuyen@tvu.edu.vn Tra Vinh University
Nguyen Huynh Trang trangnh@ueh.edu.vn University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City
Summary: 
The current study was conducted to investigate high school EFL teachers’ perceptions towards the role of content schema activation that is focused on the pre-reading stage of their students’ reading comprehension ability and to find out the most common instructional strategies EFL teachers use to foster schema activation in the EFL classroom and gain insights into possible difficulties EFL teachers face when activating schemata in the reading lessons. The participants included 77 EFL high school teachers in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. To collect the data, a 22-item questionnaire and the semistructured interview on the teachers’ perceptions were carried out. The findings showed that although the participants had a positive perception towards the role of schema activation in English reading comprehension, they confirmed instructional strategies were not often used to activate students’ schemata in English reading comprehension. In addition, the participants tend to use more simple strategies, such as questioning, brainstorming, discussion and using audiovisual aids than complex strategies, Know - Want to know - Learned chart, semantic mapping, and anticipation guide, in order to activate students’ schemata. Most possible difficulties in activating students’ schemata in English reading comprehension were also revealed, such as the students’ limited linguistic knowledge, unfamiliar reading text’s topics, limited time for teaching reading, time-consuming work in designing the effective and appropriate schema activation activities, and the large classes. Pedagogical implications and suggestions for further research are presented based on these findings.
Keywords: 
Schema activation
reading comprehension
instructional strategies
difficulties
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