An Empirical Study of Schema Theory and Its Role in Reading Comprehension

Schema is the abstract and organized knowledge structure. Access to pertinent schema in reading would greatly facilitated meaning extraction and meaning retention. This paper quantitatively and qualitatively explored the effect of schema and how it works in reading process and finds out that readers with appropriate schema would perform significantly better than those without in both immediate and delayed recalls. That is they would recall more correct ideas and omit fewer ideas and in their expansion of the original text, more elaborations rather than distortions will be found. Besides, readers provided with schema tend to recall the text more coherently and logically.