Effects of Pre-Reading Strategies on EFL/ESL Reading Comprehension‪.‬

Introduction According to schema theory (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977), comprehending a text is an interpretive process involving the reader's background knowledge and the text itself. Prior knowledge, which is organized and stored in the reader's mind, is termed schema (plural schemata). The reader tries to activate an appropriate schema based on clues provided by the writer in the text. According to this theory, readers can comprehend the text only if they reconstruct its content by relating their own schemata to the new information in the text. Carrell (1983) drew a distinction between formal schemata and content schemata: readers who are familiar with the rhetorical or organizational structure of the text (formal schemata) should understand it; similarly, readers who possess background knowledge of the content area of the text (content schemata) should comprehend its content. Thus to help students activate appropriate schemata, pre-reading strategies are considered useful.