Effects of Prior Knowledge Activation on Secondary School Students’ Literal and Inferential Reading Comprehension
Jamila Mustapha *
Department of Arts Education, University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria.
Nkopuruk, Imikan Nseobong
Department of Arts Education, University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This research examined how the prior knowledge activation and the usual teaching techniques influenced the reading comprehension of senior secondary school students, both at the literal and the inference levels in Bida Local Government Area of Niger State, Nigeria. The enduring low performance of second language students in reading comprehension has cast doubts on the usefulness of conventional instructional methods, hence, the necessity to consider cognitively informed methods like prior knowledge activation. The research was based on the Schema Theory and used a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test non-randomised control group design. The study involved a total of 120 students in Senior Secondary School II students who were sampled among two different public secondary schools, where one school was the experimental group and the other was the control group. Researcher-made reading comprehension tests that involved literal and inferential comprehension levels were used to collect data that were proven to be valid by experts and proved to be reliable with a coefficient of 0.85. The control group was taught using the conventional method, whereas the experimental one was taught using explicit prior knowledge activation strategies. The data were interpreted by means, standard deviation and t-test at the level of 0.05. The results showed that students who were subjected to prior knowledge activation did much better compared to their peers in literal and inferential comprehension. The findings also indicated that the occurrence of prior knowledge activation was more influential in terms of inferential comprehension, which involves higher-order thinking. The researchers conclude that prior knowledge activation prior to reading boosts comprehension performance and suggest that prior knowledge activation methods used systematically during the reading instruction must be officially integrated into the reading instruction at the secondary school level. Among other things, the study recommended that professional development workshops and teacher training programmes should focus on the practical implementation of the schema-based teaching strategies.
Keywords: Prior knowledge activation, reading comprehension, literal comprehension, inferential comprehension, schema theory, second language learners