Schema Theory And Transactional Theory Of Reading Analysis

Every 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 make reading something important for all the students in their class. There are two theories that 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 before they even walk in. All students have schema and it is useful to the students’ learning. According to An (2013) “The

Tapping a students background knowledge prior to reading is important for many reasons. These reasons vary from keeping the student engaged in what is being taught, to not re-teaching a student something they already know. Taping background knowledge has to be done before any reading starts in the classroom. According to Fisher & Frey (2012) “The need for background knowledge is high. Knowledge of story elements take a reader only so far” (p. 4-5). So it is very important for background knowledge to be tapped before reading even begins. It is important because some students may think the don’t know about what will be read until the background knowledge is tapped. To me it is important for this to happen before reading so the teacher can make clear up any misconceptions some students may have about the meaning of any words that are in the text. According to Neumann and Keafer and Pinkham (2014) “Background knowledge enables readers to choose between multiple meanings of words” (p. 145). This is a perfect reason to make sure the meanings of the words from the text are clear before any reading is