The Importance Of Reading In Foreign Language

For Foreign language learners, reading is a crucial skill that can improve their language especially with literary works, which have different intentions, styles, and special use of techniques and devices. The process of reading can occur easily if the text carries the same culture values ,customs or beliefs of the reader. In contrast, the reader may encounter some difficulties in comprehending this kind of text when the writer has a different culture “this lack of common cultural schema between writers and readers is likely to cause varying degrees of misunderstandings or misperceptions in cross-cultural communication” (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983; Boxer, 2002). For this reason students have to get engaged more in those cultures. Thus, schemata

What motivate the readers to construct and extract meaning from their pre-existing knowledge known as readers’ background knowledge or schemata. Carrell and Esterhold (1983) agrees,” … text, any text, whether written or spoken, does not by itself carry meaning . Rather, according to schema theory, a text only provides the direction for listeners or readers as to how they should retrieve or construct meaning from their own, previously acquired knowledge.” (76). Thus , our evaluating , comprehending and interpreting for the literary text depends not only on the text itself which just provides hints, but also to the cultural knowledge already gained by the reader to gain the general meaning of the text .

2.Types of Schemata Mainly, there are different types sub-categorized from schemata, namely, linguistic, formal schemata, content schemata and cultural schemata which affect the comprehension and appreciation of the text.

Linguistic Schemata Linguistic schemata tackle the reader’s existent language competence including grammar rules, vocabulary and idioms. It is very important in reading comprehension because understanding what the text is saying is the key to interpret the message