Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Schema theory
A famous experiment by Bransford and Johnson (1982) asked people to read texts
such as the following:
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different
groups depending on their makeup. Of course, one pile may be sufficient
depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due

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Listening and reading processes
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to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is
important not to overdo any particular endeavour. That is, it is better to do
too few things at once than too many.
To make sense of this text, a particular piece of information is required: the passage
is about washing clothes. A person who does not have this information does not
get much out of the text. Once the topic is known, the passage is straightforward
and the comprehension level is much higher. The sentences themselves do not
change when we know the topic, but the interpretation they have in our minds
does. The background knowledge into which a text fits, sometimes called the
schema, plays a large role in how it is read.
L2 readers also need to know what the passage is about. Adams (1983) gave
American students of French the same texts as Bransford and Johnson, and tested
whether they were better or worse at learning new vocabulary when they were told
what the passage was about. Her results showed first that they were better at learn-
ing vocabulary in the first language, and second that knowing what the passage
was about helped them equally in both languages. Hence this kind of background
knowledge is relevant to both L1 and L2 processing. Patricia Carrell (1984) tested
L2 learners of English with the same texts to see not only whether the presence or
absence of context made a difference to how much they could understand, but also
the importance of whether the text had precise words like ‘clothes’ and ‘washing
machine’, or vague words like ‘things’ and ‘facilities’. Both advanced learners and
natives once again found lack of context affected their comprehension. However,
intermediate L2 learners also found the use of vague words was a hindrance, even
if, as we saw in the last chapter, such words are often of high frequency. The provi-
sion of context varied in importance according to the stage of L2 learning. At the
early stages of L2 learning, linguistic aspects of the words are as important to
understanding as context. One interesting side effect of Carrell’s research was that,
while native speakers had a fair idea of how difficult the passages were for them to
understand, non-natives did not! However, later research by Roller and Matombo
(1992) did not get the same results: speakers of Shona actually remembered more
of the Bransford and Johnson texts in English than in their first language.