knowledge of world and new concept that readers encounter as they read a text.
Considering the beneficial role of schema in one’s mind, schema theory has strongly influenced reading research. Khemlani and Lynne in
Ajideh 2003 claims that since the late 1960s, numerous theorists Goodman, 1970; Smith, 1978 have developed interactive theories of reading which place
great importance on the role of the reader and the knowledge he or she brings to bear on the text in the reading process.
Schema theory is based on the belief that every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world developed up to that point Anderson
in Wiseman, 2008. Referring to this, in teaching reading teachers should teach their students how to use their schema and store information for easy
retrieval. This existing schema and knowledge will be later used in bridging new concepts they encounter in reading to create meaning.
b. Schema-Building Strategies in Teaching Reading
Schema-building or schema activation is a strategy to help students sees the relationships between various concepts. There are two ways in which
the schema can be activated according to Cook in Ajideh 2003: first, new information from the outside world can be cognitively received and related to
prior information stored in memory via retrieval or remembering. Second, new information can be represented by new mental structure. In this case, a
nonexistence of prior schemata will build new knowledge become new schemata.
Keene and Zimmerman in Moreillon 2007:21 propose three types of connection that can help readers to build their schema including text-to-self,
text-to-text, and text-to-world. a.
Text-to-self requires students to make connection between texts and the students’ personal background knowledge. In this strategy, a teacher needs
to provide a text that is related to the students’ common problems and experience.
b. Text-to-text requires the students to make connections between texts and
different authors. The teacher needs to lead the students to compare some story elements such as setting, character, plot, conflict, theme, style, and so
on. c.
Text-to-world connection requires the students to make connection between the information from texts and the world around them. In this
case, the students deal with larger life issues. The teacher needs to encourage the students to activate their schemata relating what they hear,
what they read, and what they view. Another study suggests that schema activation in teaching reading can
be achieved through pre-reading strategy. As mentioned by Ajideh 2003, a number of pre-reading approach and methods have been proposed in the
literature for facilitating reading through activation of background knowledge. Several pre-reading strategies to activate background knowledge are
discussion-based activity, semantic mapping, questioning, providing pictures, graphs, charts, or other visual aids, and previewing.
12 Experience-Text-Relationship Method
a. Definition of Experience-Text-Relationship Method
