[MUSIC] One area that has received a great deal of attention from teachers and researchers is the role of background knowledge in reading and in reading comprehension. Clearly, if you know something about a topic, you're going to understand a text about this topic more easily than if it is a topic you know nothing about. I understand texts about choral singing much more easily than I know texts about football, for example. Some scholars connect this to the idea of a schema, which Carrell and Eisterhold call previously acquired knowledge structures. And which Grabe defines as related sets of knowledge linked together in an established frame. The idea is that schemers, or schemata, are activated with we read, and help us interpret the text. They are said to help readers make inferences about what they are reading, and for an example, facilitate summarizing a text. They are said to help both in the comprehension of information, and in remembering that information. I'd like to illustrate this with two examples. The first one is the text you will see now. You may wish to pause the video, read the text, decide what it is about, and go on. You are probably perplexed by this, however if I told you that this was about doing the laundry, suddenly everything would fall into place. When participants in an experiment heard this text, but were not told what it was about, they were confused and did not remember anything about it. Those participants who were told that this was about washing clothes understood and were able to remember a great deal. Clearly, in this case, the schemer helped them organize the input. Another well known example is the text you will see now. Again, read this text and think what it is about. It turns out that people interpret this text differently according to their previous experience. Some people interpret this as being about playing cards. Others interpret this as four friends making music together. One of them plays the recorder. Which one did you think of? These examples suggest that our interpretation of the text is governed not only by the text itself, but also by our own knowledge of the topic and the schemata that we were able to use in order to organize the incoming information. An interesting study that showed how background knowledge can interfere with our understanding of a text is the study by Steffensen and Joag-Dev. They asked two groups of participants to read two texts. Each text was a letter about a wedding. One letter was about a typical wedding in the United States, and the other letter was about a typical Indian wedding. The two groups who read the letters were 20 participants from India, and 20 participants from the United States. The participants were given the texts, and after reading each letter, they were asked to write down what they recalled, what they remembered from it. Steffensen and Joag-Dev found that each group read the passage about its own country more quickly and remembered more of it. What is also interesting, is that each group made many more distortions in their retelling of the story of the other culture. So the Indian readers distorted the US letter when they reported it. And the United States participants distorted the Indian letter when they reported it. For example, in the Indian wedding, there was a description of two separate events, a wedding feast and then a reception. The US readers collapsed these two events into one. They did not realize that there was a difference between these two events. Today, however, the importance of background knowledge is not as emphasized amongst reading researchers as it was in the past. There are a number of issues that arise with it. Firstly, background knowledge is purely theorized and can fall into different categories. Graba suggests that it can be subdivided into general knowledge of the world, cultural knowledge, topical knowledge, and specialist expertise knowledge. Another important point is that background knowledge interacts with other areas, such as language proficiency, motivation, and the purpose for reading. I would also suggest that it's easy to construct a test in such a way that background knowledge is needed to answer specific questions on the text. That's why I've always learned the Steffensen and Joag-Dev study that I referred to earlier. It looks at the elaborations that readers make and it allows for each reader's background knowledge to intrude as in when. But in cases of naturalistic reading, where a reader is reading a general text rather than a specialist text, background knowledge is less likely to intrude on comprehension. And the extent to which it can lead the reader to the wrong conclusion is much smaller than was thought in the past. And after all, we don't normally come across texts like the laundry text, which avoids any specific clue to what the text is about. And we also don't come across texts like the playing text. With such a high percentage of words have more than one meaning and where these meanings belong to two different and very distinct schemata. So it's not clear what these texts and what these experiments tell us about normal reading. What is probably more important in our everyday reading, is the ability of the reader to monitor their comprehension. To identify what they haven't understood. To identify the possible causes of this misunderstanding. And to take action to counteract or compensate for this. A good example of this is reported by Steffensen and Joag-dev. One of the US readers realized that the description of the wedding feast did not conform to his expectations of such an event because the wedding feast was held in shifts. Importantly, this reader did not hold onto his background knowledge of a wedding. He was unable to make sense of that part of the text and he indicated this very clearly in his recall protocol. At this point, I would like you to read three texts and think whether you can find examples of background knowledge in them. Think also, whether a reader who did not have this background knowledge would have difficulty in understanding the text. The three texts are the Glass Ceiling, which is taken from the Evening Standard. Flying Like a Bird, which is taken from an in-flight magazine. And the Oscars should reward talent regardless of color or creed, taken from The Big Issue. Make notes about which pieces of background knowledge are referred to in each text. And I will talk about my own take on the role of background knowledge in these texts in the next video. [MUSIC]
