RP-Department of English & Linguistics

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Influence of schema theory on reader-responses to Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965): A case of Kenyan university undergraduate students
(Royallite Global, 2020) Ayieko, Gerry
This study investigated the effect of the story schema teaching model on Kenyan university undergraduate reader-response to Soyinka’s The Interpreters (1965). Schema theory describes the interaction readers’ background knowledge in reading tasks. Most researchers using schema theory have established that instruction of story grammar improves the reading comprehension of narratives, however, there is a dearth of studies that have investigated the effect of teaching strategy on the comprehension of psychological novels such as The Interpreters. A true experimental design which is the post-test only control group treatment with random assignment. The experimental group received experimental treatment: instruction on the story schema while the control did not. Three tests measured the dependent variable: a multiple-choice test story recall and story frame test of the selected passages from The Interpreters. One-way ANOVA tests show that the experimental groups were significantly better than the control group in all the three tests: story recall, the story-grammar, and multiple-choice questions. The story mapping theory can be adapted as a model for teaching narratives in order to enhance text comprehension by University undergraduate students.