The Effect of Grammar vs. Vocabulary Pre-teaching on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension: A Schema - Theoretic View of Reading

This study was designed to investigate the effect of grammar and vocabulary pre-teaching, as two types of pre-reading activities, on the Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension from a schema–theoretic perspective. The sample consisted of 90 female students studying at pre-university centers of Isfahan. The subjects were randomly divided into three equal-in-number groups. They participated in a test of overall language proficiency, and the results indicated that they were linguistically homogeneous. Then, the three groups were exposed to different treatments. Group A received grammar pre-teaching, whereas group B received vocabulary pre-teaching. The subject in group C (the control group), however, received no pre-teaching. The subjects in each one of the experimental groups took reading comprehension posttests. The results showed no significant difference among the three groups though the vocabulary group performed slightly better than the other two groups, and the performance of the grammar group was seemingly worse than the control group. The findings of the study are discussed in detail with reference to the schema-theoretic view of reading.