An Experimental Study-the Effect Of The Visual Approach And The Non-Visual Approach On The Teaching Of The Background Knowledge For Different Types Of Passages

The schemata theory helps us to realize that a reader's poor comprehension is not only caused by his poor linguistic knowledge but also caused by his lacking of background knowledge. People used to put more stress on linguistic schema, ascribing failure to comprehend a text to the reader's deficiencies in language processing skills. Consequently, poor readers were encouraged to expand their vocabularies and to gain greater control over complex syntactic structures in order to improve reading comprehension. However, most often, a reader's failure to comprehend a text is due to his failure to activate an appropriate content schema. The reader may be familiar with every word and every grammatical item in the text, yet still may fail to comprehend the text, because he fails to activate an appropriate content schema. And most often, he fails to activate a schema because the schema is culturally specific or is not the part of his knowledge. Schemata Theory greatly emphasizes the important role of background knowledge in reading comprehension.Nowadays, many teachers have applied the schemata theory into reading teaching and paid much attention to the background knowledge teaching. But how to teach the background knowledge effectively still remains a question. Some teachers prefer using verbal way of teaching while others suggest giving pictures or other visual materials to facilitate the teaching. There are some studies on visual organizer show that the visual materials, like pictures, videos or graphic charts, can generally enhance people's comprehension on the target-language text, especially for those who have low language proficiency. But will the visual way of teaching be all better than the verbal way on background knowledge teaching, enhancing the students understanding toward the written information. As we know, the reading materials are various in its types, covering different areas, including both concrete and abstract concepts. When teaching background knowledge on those passages, which teaching method will be more helpful, visual or non-visual?The present study is going to answer the following two questions:(1) Do the visual aid and the non-visual aid teaching method exert the same effect on the teaching of background knowledge for different types of passages?(2) If it is not, for what types of passage, the visual way is more effective and for what types of passages, the non-visual way is more effective?In the study, a total of 26 students were tested on six passages which are different in their types. Three of them are passages about the concrete things and three are about the abstract things. Those 26 students were divided into two groups and the two groups are required to be the same in reading ability. They were taught differently on the background knowledge. The teaching for the experimental group has visual materials accompanied while the control group has no visual materials.After the study, it is found that the mean scores for the experimental group are always better than those of the control group on all six passages and hence it is concluded that the visual way does benefit the students' background knowledge learning no matter whether the content involved is concrete or abstract and it is more effective if the content is concrete. The visual materials, no matter whether pictures or charts are used, can give the students more vivid and directly perceived image on the given information, especially the information about the concrete thing.