The Role of Academic Schema in Reading Comprehension at Intermediate Level

Kalsoom Jahan, Sumaira Mukhtar, Nayab Waqas Khan

Abstract

This study includes the schematic knowledge of the students in reading comprehension. The academic background and the field of the study has been considered as schematic knowledge of the students. The study observed the factors affecting reading comprehension of the learners by using academic texts. Academic text is also compared with non-academic texts to determine the relevance of academic schema in reading comprehension. This is a quantitative study and data was collected from intermediate students of Lahore, Cantt. 160 students were selected from F.Sc (pre-engineering), F.Sc (pre-medical) ICS, and I.Com, as participants of the study. Two reading comprehension tests were settled, first test was, according to student's educational field and the second one was from an English newspaper. Both tests were conducted with the same participants. Independent sample t-test, and paired sample t-test were conducted by the use of Statistical Package for social sciences SPSS version 21. The results of the study reflected that academic background knowledge helped the learners in activating academic schema for better reading comprehension than using a general text.Moreover, the demographic factors selected in the study such as, mother tongue, instructional language, and years of education did not affect the reading comprehension results.This study has left new horizons for future researches in the field of reading comprehension skills, as the factors included in this study are too limited, more demographic and cognitive factors can be included in the study to get more authentic results.