earticle

영어

This study aimed to investigate how Korean college readers attempted to process texts when encountering texts written in their first language or English, using their schematic knowledge. More specifically, it attempted to figure out how those readers utilized their content and formal schema when reading texts which were familiar or unfamiliar with them, in terms of its topic and experience. This research made use of students’ English language proficiency test scores, and two kinds of data from a questionnaire regarding how they perceived new information in the text, and their summaries after they’re done with reading those two texts. The results of data analysis reinforced that background knowledge of Korean EFL readers help themselves understand the Korean text better and more easily than English texts. It has also indicated that all of those students did mention the Korean text was easy to understand because they already had experiences relating with the text and they could use their background knowledge to process it. On the other hand, they struggled while reading the English text with its vocabulary, and topic. It has also been shown that their summaries showed differences in terms of its average length, and the average number of words used in a sentence. Finally, pedagogical implications in using readers’ schema in the reading class were suggested.