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Schema Theory and Knowledge-Based Processes in Second Language Reading Comprehension - A Need For Alternative Perspectives Hossein Nassaji PDF
Schema Theory and Knowledge-Based Processes in Second Language Reading Comprehension - A Need For Alternative Perspectives Hossein Nassaji PDF
Schema Theory and Knowledge-Based Processes in Second Language Reading Comprehension - A Need For Alternative Perspectives Hossein Nassaji PDF
How is knowledge represented and organized in the mind? What role does it play in
discourse comprehension and interpretation? What are the exact mechanisms whereby
knowledge-based processes are utilised in comprehension? These are questions that
have puzzled psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists for years. Despite major de-
velopments in the field of second language (L2) reading over the last two decades,
many attempts at explaining the role of knowledge in L2 comprehension have been
made almost exclusively in the context of schema theory, a perspective that provides an
expectation-driven conception of the role of knowledge and considers that preexisting
knowledge provides the main guiding context through which information is processed
and interpreted. In this article, I first review and critically analyze the major assumptions
underlying schema theory and the processes that it postulates underlie knowledge repre-
sentation and comprehension. Then I consider an alternative perspective, a construction-
integration model of discourse comprehension, and discuss how this perspective, when
applied to L2 reading comprehension, offers a fundamentally different and more detailed
account of the role of knowledge and knowledge-based processes that L2 researchers
had previously tried to explain within schema-theoretic principles.
Introduction
Any attempt to explain the processes whereby the text is understood entails
a profound understanding of the cognitive processes in which knowledge is
The author would like to thank Alister Cumming, Cordon Wells, three anonymous reviewers, and
the editor, Nick Ellis, for helpful comments on initial drafts of this paper.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hossein Nassaji, Linguistics
Department, University of Victoria, PO Box 3045, Victoria, BC, Canada VSW 3P4.
are highly predictable in the context (Balota, Pollatsck, & Rayner, 1985; Pollat-
sek, 1993; Rayner, 1986; Rayner & Sereno, 1994). The top-down view of the
role of knowledge has lost much of its previous theoretical appeal in L2 reading,
too. A growing body of L2 research now exists to document the critical role of
lower level processes in L2 reading comprehension (e.g., Haynes & Carr, 1990;
Horiba, 1996; Koda, 1992, 1998, 1999; Nassaji & Geva, 1999; Segalowitz,
Poulsen, & Komoda, 1991; Segalowitz, Segalowitz, & Wood, 1998).
As a consequence of these developments, most of the current models of
L2 reading comprehension are interactive in that L2 comprehension is consid-
ered to be a process consisting of both data-driven and reader-driven processes
(e.g., Bernhardt, 1991; Carrell, Devine, & Eskey, 1988; Grabe, 1991; Swaffar,
1988; Swaffar, Arens, & Byrnes, 1991). However, it is important to note that
none of these models specifies how the reading system works and how the in-
teraction between the different knowledge sources takes place (Brown, 1998).
Furthermore, certain areas of L2 reading still seem to be biased implicitly or
explicitly toward the reader-driven conceptions of the role of knowledge. This
bias is strongly discernible in the field of L2 reading instruction (Paran, 1996).
Even in the area of L2 research, there is still a relatively much larger volume
of research on the role of top-down conceptual variables than lower level text-
based variables. In particular, attempts at understanding and explaining the role
of conceptual variables in L2 research are still made almost exclusively in the
context of schema and schema theory (see Fitzgerald, 1995). I will discuss some
of these areas later, and then will show how they can be dealt with and explained
in a more detailed manner by an alternative view of the role of knowledge in
L2 reading comprehension.
what values should be assigned to a particular slot of a selected schema; (c) de-
fault inferencing, which involves assigning default values to slots of an already
activated schema; and (d) absence of knowledge inferencing, which involves
drawing conclusions in the absence of certain knowledge. Anderson and Pearson
did not elaborate on the fourth kind of inferencing but illustrated it with logic:
“If X were true, I would know it were true. Since I do not know X to be true, it
is probably false” (pp. 269–270).
There are several studies that have been designed to provide support for these
different types of inferencing. For example, a series of studies was conducted
by Anderson and his colleagues to demonstrate evidence for schema-selection
inferences (Anderson & Pichert, 1978; Anderson, Pichert, & Shirey, 1983;
Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, & Goetz, 1977). These studies presented people
with ambiguous passages that could be read and interpreted in different ways.
According to Anderson and Pearson (1984), readers interpret ambiguous texts
differently because of the different schemata they select based on the different
clues available in the text. Anderson et al. (1977), for example, asked college
students to read two texts, each allowing two different interpretations; one could
be interpreted as involving either a prisoner trying to escape from a prison or
a wrestler trying to escape from a hold by his rival in a wrestling match, and
the other as a card game or a music practice. The results indicated that readers
who had a musical background interpreted the second passage as a passage
about music and those who had a card-playing background interpreted the
same passage as a passage about card games.
Other studies have used vague passages that are difficult to understand and
remember without knowing what the passages are about. An example of these
studies is a classic study by Bransford and Johnson (1972), in which people were
presented with two vague passages: one the Balloon Serenade passage and the
other the Washing Clothes passage. One group received the vague passages with
titles and the other group without. The results indicated that those people who
received the passages with titles had much better comprehension and recall
than those who received them without titles. Anderson and Pearson (1984)
argued that these studies provide support for schema-instantiation inferencing:
To understand such passages, readers must use an already selected schema to
make sense of the vague passage by instantiating its slots and filling the slots
and gaps within the activated schema.
Although the above studies provide relevant evidence for the role of back-
ground knowledge, they have been questioned on interpretive and methodolog-
ical grounds. Sadoski et al. (1991) questioned the validity and generalizability
of these studies, arguing that “their reliance on bizarre texts calls into question
their relevance to the reading of naturally occurring texts” (p. 470). These re-
searchers argued that although all texts may have some degree of ambiguity,
a normal text is never amenable to such vastly different interpretations as per-
mitted in the texts used in Anderson et al.’s (1977) study. Studies using vague
passages (see Bransford & Johnson, 1972) have also been questioned on similar
methodological grounds. One of the problems with such studies concerns the
use of passages that are incomprehensible on their own. Alba and Hasher (1983,
p. 220) noted, “Their [Bransford and Johnson’s] passages contain no explicit,
concrete referents, and without a context to suggest exemplars for these ref-
erents, none is likely to be inferred.” These researchers maintained, “It is not
surprising then that recall of these materials is so poor; subjects had in effect
been presented with a set of unrelated sentences.”
Studies involving vague passages may be questionable on other grounds,
too. In such studies people are presented with not only “textually poor” passages
but with passages with “no context.” So there are two variables involved in
making the text difficult to understand: one the nature of the passage itself, and
the other the lack of context. If people performed poorly on such passages, it is
not at all clear why they did so. Was it because of the lack of context or because
of the poor quality of the text? It is quite possible that improvement of the
writing quality of the text could improve their comprehension and recall as well
(e.g., Coté, Goldman, & Saul, 1998; McNamara & Kintsch, 1996; Moravcsik
& Kintsch, 1993).
Among all the schema-based inferencing types, default inferencing is the
one most studied. According to schema theory, when a reader reads a text, a
certain schema is activated in which the reader fills in the slots with default
values of that schema. For example, if in reading a text, a reader encounters
a sentence such as “He pounded a nail into the wall,” the word “hammer,”
which is one of the default values associated with the verb “pound,” will be
simultaneously activated and used to fill in the empty slot for the agent of the
verb, leading to the inference that the pounding has been probably done with
“a hammer.”
Most of the support for default inferencing comes from research in which
people have been presented with certain information such as a sentence that
vaguely implies certain concepts, and then when tested, they have judged that
the information implicit in the sentence is part of the original sentence. This
reported misrecognition is taken as evidence for default values provided by
the schema (e.g., Anderson et al., 1976; Glenn, 1978; Johnson, Bransford,
& Solomon, 1973; Keenan & Kintsch, 1974). Such studies, however, have
been questioned on the grounds that the recall and the recognition techniques
used reflect processes that are reconstructive rather than constructive, that is,
processes used to recall or remember rather than processes used to understand
the text (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992, 1995; Singer, 1988; Whitney, 1987). In
other words, it is not clear whether the inferences these studies have shown
to have occurred did actually occur during comprehension or during the time
subjects were tested to recall or to recognize the information.
Another line of support for default inferencing comes from studies that
have used “cues” for recall. These studies have shown that cues implied during
comprehension are effective retrieval cues for implicit information in the text.
McKoon & Ratcliff (1981) found that readers were faster in making inferences
about the instrument of an action (e.g., a hammer) when the sentence in the
paragraph of the text implicitly indicated that the instrument had been used
(“Bobby pounded the boards together with a nail” vs. “Bobby stuck the boards
together with glue”). Other studies, however, have shown that the same cues
could also be effective recall cues even when the information is explicitly pro-
vided in the text. Corbett and Dosher (1978) found that an instrument (e.g., a
shovel) could serve as an effective retrieval cue both for when the people were
presented with a sentence with a highly likely instrument for an action, such
as “The man dug a hole,” and also when the sentence explicitly mentioned the
instrument, such as “The man dug a hole with a pitchfork.” The researchers
concluded that the fact that even in the latter case where the instrument had been
explicitly mentioned, the word “shovel” could serve as an effective retrieval cue
suggests that such inferences could not have been due to using the sentence
schema but must have been due to semantic associations activated by the cues
themselves.
Finally, default inferencing assumes that semantic structures residing in the
reader’s mind equip the reader with a slot-filling mechanism that operates in a
continual manner during comprehension, thereby predicting an infinite number
of default inferences in comprehension (McNamara, Miller, & Bransford, 1991;
Whitney, 1987). Research, however, has produced little support for this predic-
tion. Numerous studies have shown that such inferences are not made so amply
in reading (e.g., Dosher & Corbett, 1982; McKoon & Ratcliff, 1981, 1992,
1995; Singer, 1979, 1980). These studies have shown that inferences about the
agent or instrument of actions (e.g., “a shovel” for “digging a hole”), which are
highly predicted schematically, are not in fact made in comprehension.
can take account of the whole range of issues discussed. Instead, the aim is to
consider an alternative perspective on the role of knowledge in comprehension
and to see how this perspective, particularly when supplemented with ideas
from memory research, can offer a more encompassing account of the role of
knowledge and knowledge-based processes in L2 reading comprehension. The
perspective is based on models influenced by research on human memory and
recall (e.g., Albrecht & O’Brien, 1993, Gernsbacher, 1995; Goldman & Varma,
1995; Kintsch, 1998; McClelland, 1987; McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986; Myers
& O’Brien, 1998; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
Their significant contribution has been the attempts to describe in an explicit
and detailed way the different cognitive processes involved in text comprehen-
sion and recall. These models differ from one another; however, they all share a
common conception of the role of knowledge in comprehension. Among these
models, I will consider Kintsch and his colleagues’ discourse comprehension
models, particularly, Kintsch’s (1988, 1998) construction-integration model.
This model has been well researched in recent years by L1 reading researchers
and is now one of the most widely accepted scientific models of text compre-
hension in the literature (Sadoski, 1999; Sanford & Garrod, 1998). Although it
would be imprecise to hold that the model has not been recognized in L2 read-
ing, it appears that its full potential application in L2 reading comprehension
theory and research has not been well explored.
Kintsch’s theory of text comprehension was developed in conjunction with
research on knowledge activation in psychology and the suggestion that the idea
of schema as posited in artificial intelligence approaches is not applicable in
the context of human comprehension. Kintsch (1988) believed that “prediction
or expectation-based systems that use frames or scripts do not adapt easily to
new contexts; pre-structured knowledge hardly ever is exactly in the form that
is needed” (p. 180). Kintsch argued that if schematic notions are “powerful
enough, they are too inflexible, and if they are general enough, they fail in their
constraining function” (p. 164). Thus, he and his colleagues began to develop an
alternative, less rigid, and less controlled view of the role of knowledge than the
one suggested by schema theory. The first version of their model was proposed
by Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) and then revised and elaborated on by van Dijk
and Kintsch (1983). Further revisions and elaborations were made by Kintsch
(1988), culminating in a considerably detailed version of the same model in
Kintsch’s recent (1998) book, Comprehension: A Paradigm for Cognition. The
model is too complex to review here, but I will consider its key ideas.
The model distinguishes between two main processes: a construction pro-
cess, whereby a textbase containing the propositional meaning of the text is
constructed from the textual input, and an integration process, whereby the
constructed textbase becomes integrated into the reader’s global knowledge,
forming a coherent mental representation of what the text is about or a situation
model. In Kintsch’s model, comprehension depends heavily on knowledge. But
the organization of knowledge is not “prestored” (cf. Schank, 1982); rather, it
emerges in the context of the task and is relatively unstructured as opposed to
the highly structured knowledge representations suggested by semantic theo-
ries such as schema theory (Kintsch, 1998). This organization is in the form
of an associative network of propositions,1 which are generated in a bottom-up
manner by the textual data.
The process of constructing the textbase occurs in several steps. First, text
propositions corresponding to the actual semantics of the text (also called mi-
cropropositions) are constructed directly from words and phrases in the text. The
propositions thus generated activate in the knowledge net other propositions and
their associates, both relevant and irrelevant, leading to a semantic network that
includes both coherent and incoherent representations. This net will be revised
subsequently through a process of elaboration and inference, in which the textual
propositions as well as their randomly generated neighbors will be constrained
by the reader’s knowledge base. Additional compatible propositions will also
be inferred. The final step involves organizing the textbase and assigning values
to the different concepts and propositions. At this stage, the propositions gen-
erated are linked together and become interconnected with both their previous
and subsequent propositions, representing the local meaning relationships (or
the “microstructure”), and with higher level concepts in the network, represent-
ing the more global relationships in the text (or the “macrostructure”). These
connections create a kind of local coherence between and across the different
individual propositions and between the propositions and the overall topic of
the discourse, which are then used to draw inferences. Once this initial semantic
net is constructed, the integration processes take over, in which the information
content produced so far becomes integrated into the larger discourse context,
generating a mental representation or situation model.
Integration is a fine-tuning process that occurs at all levels of text process-
ing, including word, sentence, and discourse levels. These processes occur in
short iterative cycles, in each of which a new network of textual meaning is
constructed, processed, and then immediately integrated with what is retained
in the working memory from the previous cycle; this is then repeated in new
cycles. The integration process goes on until all of the inconsistencies in the
mental representation of the text are eliminated, such that a coherent interpre-
tation emerges. It is important to note that all of these processes are automatic
and occur through connectionist principles, in which the more appropriate and
essential propositions about the current state of comprehension are augmented
and the less appropriate ones are inhibited in an associative manner (Kintsch,
1998). However, if this automatic process fails, the reader may engage in more
strategic problem-solving processes (Garrod & Sanford, 1998; Kintsch, 1988;
van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).
How propositions are actually constructed is beyond the scope of this ar-
ticle. In fact, Kintsch’s construction-integration model itself did not include
any specific mechanism for how propositions are generated, but there are now
different accounts available that specify how these meaning units are con-
structed. One prevalent account is that there are certain lower level lexico-
syntactic and sentence-parsing mechanisms that operate on the textual data to
produce or guide the production of propositions (for further detail, see Kintsch,
1992; Perfetti, 1990; Perfetti & Britt, 1995; Turner, Britton, Andraessen, &
McCutchen, 1996).
As noted earlier, in the construction-integration view, both the construc-
tion and integration processes operate in a connectionist manner. Central to
this view is the idea that the knowledge that guides the comprehension system
is not outside the text nor does the processing system proceed by generating
top-down expectations and hypotheses and checking them against textual infor-
mation as suggested by schema theory. Rather, knowledge is generated through
activation patterns initiated by the textual information and the progressive up-
grading of previously established associations in the text. This view of the role of
knowledge in comprehension is currently shared by many other computational
and memory-based models (e.g., Cook, Halleran, & O’Brien, 1998; Gerrig
& McKoon, 1998; McKoon, Gerrig, & Greene, 1996), in which knowledge
plays its role through a “fast-acting passive resonance process” (Cook et al.,
p. 110), rather than through a matching process, as suggested by schema theory.
In these models, the information generated from the text is stored in the working
memory and functions as a signal in an associative manner to all of the informa-
tion in long-term memory. The information from the discourse representation
and general world knowledge gets activated simultaneously in response to this
signal.
Connectionist computational models have several characteristics that make
them different from other models. In these models, the comprehension-
processing system is not controlled by knowledge schemata, nor is the in-
fluence of knowledge schemata from higher levels fed back into lower levels of
processing (McClelland, 1987). Comprehension proceeds through a constraint-
satisfaction mechanism, which includes a collective satisfaction of all sorts
such as the main theme or idea in a text or the more interesting and important
information in a story. A schema-based explanation of the comprehension ad-
vantage of these features suggests that the reader comprehends top-level features
better simply as a function of the relevant schema that he or she brings to the
task of interpreting the text.
This explanation suggests that the relevant schema contains and represents
ideas in the mind in a particular order and at an already commensurate level
of importance. This preexisting mental representation of ideas then acts as an
advance organizer during comprehension and helps the reader recognize, ar-
range, and interpret the ideas accordingly. The utilization of the same schema
during recall allows readers to reconstruct the information encoded in compre-
hension and helps them to recall these ideas in their respective order or level of
importance as well.
An alternative explanation, however, suggests that the comprehension ac-
cessibility of top-level ideas is related to far more complex cognitive processes,
which involve not only the reader’s previous mental representation of ideas
but also the nature of the propositions contained in the text, as well as the
way they are encoded and maintained in memory. As noted earlier, a key no-
tion in the construction-integration model is the idea of establishing an initial
“textbase” that, when created successfully, gives rise to a semantically ordered
hierarchical structure of information. This hierarchically structured textbase,
along with the varied link strengths of its propositions, can then explain the
effect of a host of variables, such as referential and co-referential variables,
concreteness, abstractness, and the rhetorical and top-level variables of texts
(see Freedle, 1997). These effects can be explained in terms of superordinate
and subordinate effects in the hierarchy, which suggest that the ideas situated
higher in the hierarchy are understood and recalled better than those that are
lower. These effects can also be explained in terms of the degree and depth
of cognitive processing of higher level ideas. The higher level ideas, due to
their overarching connection with various lower level ideas, are more avail-
able for processing. Due to their position, they are referred to more during
encoding, and hence are called into, and remain in, working memory more
often than other ideas (Alba & Hasher, 1983). In other words, they receive
increased processing attention and hence more chance of being rehearsed in
the working memory. These processes then enhance both the comprehension
and recall of the top-level or more important ideas in the text. This assump-
tion is different from that of schema-based explanations, which assume that
these advantages are mostly produced as a result of top-down extratextual
operations.
Schema theory predicts that when a passage appears within a specific context,
it should be understood and recalled better than when it is without a context.
In particular, when L2 readers have prior knowledge about a passage they read,
they ought to comprehend and recall that passage better than when they do
not have as much prior knowledge about that passage. Carrell’s study, however,
provided no positive support for any of the background-knowledge variables
tested in the recall performance of the advanced L2 readers. More surprisingly,
the unfamiliar passage was recalled better than the familiar passage by both
the advanced L2 and L1 native readers. To explain such unexpected findings,
Carrell proposed that schema-based processes were simply not operative in the
case of the L2 readers: “Neither advanced nor high-intermediate ESL readers
appear to utilize context or textual cues” (p. 199). Carrell argued that L2 readers
do not behave like L1 readers: “they may be processing the literal meaning of
the text, but they are not making the necessary connections between the text
and the appropriate background information” (p. 200).
However, there are problems with this interpretation of the results. First, top-
down or bottom-up processes rarely exist in isolation in reading comprehension
in either L1 or L2 reading. Second, in Carrell’s (1983) study, the unfamiliar text
was recalled better than the familiar text by both L1 and L2 readers; thus, the
results cannot be simply explained in terms of the difference between L1 and
L2 reading, nor can they be explained in terms of the low level of language
proficiency of the L2 readers because they were highly advanced L2 readers.2
Lee (1986) replicated Carrell’s (1983) study using the same materials and
procedures. In Lee’s study, the readers were also advanced in their L2 profi-
ciency, but they were second language readers of Spanish. However, Lee asked
them to recall the passage in their L1 (in Carrell’s study, the recall had been
done in L2) because he thought that the reason Carrell did not find any role for
background-knowledge variables might have been due to the reader’s inability
to do the recall in their L2.3 Lee found a main effect for context. However, he
came up with findings similar to those of Carrell regarding familiar/unfamiliar
texts, although in the case of Lee’s study, the pattern of interactions was more
complex. Nevertheless, he still found that his readers recalled the unfamiliar
text better than the familiar text under the no-context condition. Using similar
materials and procedures, Roller and Matambo (1992) investigated the role of
the same background-knowledge variables but with different readers. This time,
Roller and Matambo used advanced bilingual readers who read the texts in their
L1, Shona, and in their L2, English. Roller and Matambo had predicted that
if the language proficiency threshold were a factor in determining the use of
context, then providing the context for L1 readers would at least improve their
recall performance. Contrary to this prediction, they found no effect for the role
of context, even when the readers were reading in their L1. Moreover, Roller
and Matambo found that their readers recalled the unfamiliar text better than
the familiar text. What was even more surprising was that the provision of con-
text negatively affected both the native and the L2 reader’s performance when
reading the unfamiliar text. In response to these findings, Roller and Matambo
remarked, “it is difficult to explain why this interaction occurred” (p. 136). They
held, “apparently, there may be other factors than familiarity which account for
the better recall of the unfamiliar Balloon Serenade passage” (p. 135).
What is evident here is that the results obtained in the above studies are
difficult to interpret in terms of schema-theoretic principles. Thus, they call for
alternative explanations, such as a construction-integration view of L2 read-
ing. As discussed earlier, in the construction-integration view, the initial and
the critical phase of comprehension is the construction of a textbase, which
contains the principal meaning relationships for the text (and is automatic and
less affected by the reader’s prior knowledge). For this process to be successful,
what is needed is the presence of adequate textual connections and cues for join-
ing and assembling the propositions and establishing the meaning relationships
during encoding (Kintsch, 1988; McNamara & Kintsch, 1996). These connec-
tions take place initially through argument overlap and propositional embedding
(Kintsch, 1974; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978), processes whereby concepts are
interconnected through arguments they share with either neighboring propo-
sitions, higher level propositions, or embedded propositions. It is the quality
of the shared arguments and embedded propositions, as well as the strength of
their association, that determines the creation of a coherent textbase. If the read-
ing passage lacks these necessary properties, as it did in the case of Bransford
and Johnson’s (1972) passages, these connections will not be appropriately es-
tablished and the construction process will be seriously impaired, resulting in
a poor and incoherent textbase. The lack of these connections would greatly
tax the working memory resources during encoding, causing the unconnected
propositions to remain longer in the working memory before any meaning rela-
tionships could be established (Gibson, 1998), which would then require either
more processing time and resources or lead to fewer propositions being gener-
ated during the construction process and then assembled and interpreted during
the integration process.
In the case of L2 readers, there are additional factors that can make the
construction-integration processes more complicated than in the case of L1
readers. A number of studies examining and comparing text-processing mech-
anisms in L1 and L2 reading comprehension have shown that skilled L2 readers
model in L2 reading. Evidence for the idea that comprehension and recall de-
pend on the efficacy of the textbase and the encoding of the properties of texts
can be seen in several recent studies (Carrell, 1992; Horiba, 1996; Horiba et al.,
1993; Taillefer, 1996; Walters & Wolf, 1986; Zwaan & Brown, 1996). Horiba
et al., for example, investigated how structural properties of texts affect readers’
mental representations of texts. Analyzing the reading-recall protocols of L2
readers in terms of two idea categories—structure-preserving ideas (defined as
information that also carries the structural property of the original text) and
meaning-preserving ideas (defined as the “core information” remembered)—
these researchers found that not only did L2 readers remember the structure-
preserving ideas but also the number of structure-preserving ideas in their recall
was much higher than that of meaning-preserving ideas. What these findings
seem to imply is that, while reading, the L2 readers encoded and stored the
rhetorical information as part of their mental representation of the text. These
findings are not consistent with the idea that what readers process and represent
in memory are only the semantics of the text. On the other hand, they are con-
sistent with, and provide support for, the idea that comprehension is a process
of creating a textbase (that includes the textual and rhetorical features) as well
as a knowledge-based interpretation of the text.
Carrell (1992) investigated the effect of implicit and explicit awareness of
text structure on the written recall protocols of high-intermediate English as a
second language (ESL) learners. Carrell found a significant effect of implicit
awareness of text structure on the reader’s recall performance; however, she
did not find a similar effect for explicit awareness of text structure. What this
finding suggests is (a) that readers make significant use of their knowledge of
text structure in organizing their recall protocols but (b) that they process and
encode such textual features without necessarily being aware of them. This
finding is not consistent with a problem-solving view of the role of knowl-
edge in comprehension, but it is consistent with a distinction between implicit
and explicit textbase processes (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and the idea that
the principles underlying explicit textual knowledge are not identical to those
underlying actual text representation processes.
Other evidence for a construction-integration view comes from studies that
have shown that linguistic proficiency and prior knowledge make important but
distinct contributions to reading comprehension (e.g., Barry & Lazarte, 1995,
1998; Chen & Donin, 1997; Hammadou, 1991). Barry and Lazarte (1995),
for example, found that while the linguistic complexity of L2 Spanish texts
had a significant effect on the proportion of core propositions recalled, prior
knowledge of the topic did not. In a follow-up study, Barry and Lazarte (1998)
found that prior knowledge of topics had a significant effect on the generation of
elaborations and inferences (see also Cumming et al., 1989; Zwaan & Brown,
1996). Investigating the effects of linguistic knowledge and domain-specific
knowledge on Chinese subjects’ reading of texts in both L1 and L2, Chen and
Donin found that linguistic knowledge had a consistent effect on lower level
lexical and syntactic processing, but that domain-specific knowledge had a
strong effect on higher level semantic and conceptual information but a minor
effect on lower level processes. As Chen and Donin also pointed out, it appears
that these findings cannot be explained by reading models in which lower level
processes are instantaneously affected by higher level processes. But a possible
explanation may come from models in which text comprehension involves
different levels of representation, some generated from the linguistic input and
the learner’s processing of the lower level lexical and syntactic content of the
text (e.g., the textbase) and others from higher level processes of integrating
that content with the reader’s conceptual and prior knowledge (e.g., situation-
model).
Finally, it is suggested that the above findings have at least three implications
for L2 reading research and theory: (a) It is necessary to distinguish between
different levels of meaning representations in L2 reading comprehension and
study these levels with reference to the different procedures involved in gen-
erating them; (b) different knowledge sources, linguistic or conceptual, may
involve different processes, which may have qualitatively differential effects on
different levels of representation in text comprehension; and (c) knowledge in
terms of explicit awareness, while helpful, may not be required for text pro-
cessing. These are the issues that should be considered when investigating the
role of different knowledge-based processes in L2 reading comprehension. In
this context, a construction-integration view of L2 reading may provide insights
into understanding these processes and explaining the possible independent and
interactive effects of the various processes involved in the different levels of
representation in L2 reading comprehension.
Conclusion
No one doubts that L2 reading comprehension is a function of the use of mul-
tiple sources of knowledge, including background knowledge. In this sense,
schema theory has led to useful insights by bringing to our attention the role
of this knowledge. However, it seems that knowledge-based processes and the
Notes
1 Propositions are the smallest idea units that can be judged to be true or false. For
example, the sentence, “Jack sent a thank-you letter to Mary” contains three
propositions: (1) Jack sent a letter, (2) the letter was for Mary, and (3) the letter was
a thank-you letter.
2 See Hudson (1982), who found a greater effect of background knowledge for
beginning and intermediate L2 readers than for advanced L2 readers.
3 Chen and Donin (1997) found no significant effect for language of recall, whether
L1 or L2, on remembering the semantic content of text. In their study, Chinese
readers did not recall more information from the text when they were doing the
recall in their L1 (Chinese) compared to when they were doing so in their L2
(English). This lack of difference, the researchers suggested, could be partly
attributable to the greater processing demand involved in using two typologically
different languages such as Chinese and English in reading and recall and to the
fact that going back and forth from two distant languages might not be easier than
using one language in both reading and recall. Indeed, future research comparing
typologically similar and different languages in both reading and recall is needed to
further investigate the effect of language of recall.
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