The influence of content, linguistic and formal schema theory on reading comprehension

"Reading is one of the main processes by which students learn a language. This process makes use of the schema theory (Shuying An, 2013) as it studies the use of the reader's prior knowledge and the text understanding. Several researchers have shown that schema helps to improve the students reading skill (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983; Goodman, 1967; Khaki, 2014; Rumelhart,1980). However, LEI students seem to face problems when reading which affects their performance when they write academic texts. It is worth mentioning that this type of study has not been carried out within the LEI program before, thus, this study would provide more information regarding this theory. In this research, thirty students will read a texts to determine if and how they make use of the three types of schema. Likewise, they will answer an open-ended questionnaire in order to gather information concerning their reading process.