THREE COMPONENTS OF BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE IN READING COMPREHENSION¹

TLDR

Reading comprehension depends on linguistic knowledge, general world knowledge, and the activation of that knowledge, with prior knowledge of content area, contextual cues, and lexical transparency identified as key components. This study examines how these three background knowledge components affect reading comprehension in native and nonnative readers. Native readers show significant effects of all three components on comprehension, whereas nonnative readers show no significant effects and lack awareness of text difficulty.

Abstract

Research in native (English) and nonnative (ESL) reading comprehension has shown that the ability to understand texts is based not only on the comprehender's linguistic knowledge, but also on general knowledge of the world and the extent to which that knowledge is activated during processing. Separate components of background knowledge which have been identified in the literature are: (1) prior knowledge in the content area of the text (familiar vs. novel); (2) prior knowledge that the text is about a particular content area (context vs. no context); and (3) degree to which the lexical items in the text reveal the content area (transparent vs. opaque). This paper reports a study which shows the individual and interactive effects of these three separate variables on the reading comprehension of both native (English) and nonnative (ESL) readers. Results indicate that, unlike native speakers for whom all three components of background knowledge play a significant role in reading, understanding, and recalling a text, nonnative readers show virtually no significant effects of background knowledge. Further, also unlike native readers, nonnative readers appear not to have a good sense of how easy or difficult a text is for them to understand. These findings are discussed in relation to schema‐theoretical views of reading as an interactive process between the text and the reader, and in relation to their implications for ESL reading pedagogy.