Schema Theory Reflective Essay

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Each student in a classroom can and very well may have different characteristics, so all students characteristics are different in some way. Some students’ may have characteristics that help them as readers in a classroom and some may have characteristics that hinder them as readers in a classroom. It is vitally important for a teacher to learn the characteristics of each student in order to present reading as something important for all the students in their class. There are two theories that I want to discuss, they are Schema Theory and Transactional Theory of Reading. Schema is the information that a student walks into the classroom with. This is the background knowledge the student has on the subject that is being taught in the classroom …show more content…

Teachers are able to see what the students know prior to teaching anything. Gaining insight of the background knowledge of the individual student allows the teacher to see the knowledge each student has. The teacher first decides which topic they will present to the class. The teacher will then create a KWL chart, each student will receive a chart as well as the teacher will have one on the board. Next the teacher will ask the students to think about the words associated with the topic, and record in the K column. The teacher then asks the students to think about what they want to learn about the topic and record their thoughts in the W column. The L column is used for during or after reading. The teacher lets the students fill out the L column and they discuss the information in the L column as a whole class …show more content…

Developing content vocabulary and concepts lets teachers help students understand the vocabulary that will be encountered in the text that is going to be read in a class. According to Cohen (2012) “By learning how to comprehend the terminology and vocabulary they encounter, they become better able to grasp the underlying concepts” (p. 72). This is true in the field of science since there are several concepts that are much easier to grasp when the vocabulary is sensible to the student. Therefore, some of the vocabulary in this context could be difficult for some students to understand since these may be words that some of the students may have never encountered before. According to Fisher & Frey (2012) “knowing a word involves more than definition;it also means understanding its use in relation to the context” (p. 40). This is making sure the students know more than just the standard definition of a word, the student needs to know the context the word is being used in as well. Furthermore, after students understand this, reading the text for the specific class may better sense to students. The pre reading strategy I would use in a science class to teach the types of rock would be a Semantic Feature Analysis. The SFA steps that would be used are, the teacher would think of the topic for the SFA. The next step would be for the teacher to create a graphic organizer with the types of rock on the left side and the characteristics of rocks on the top. Students will receive the

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