Dominant Influence of Linguistic Knowledge in EFL Reading Comprehension: Schemata Analysis

Many studies imply that EFL students broadly use their schemata or background knowledge in comprehending the reading texts, including their formal and content schemata. Therefore, this study aims to know the influence of these schemata especially the formal schemata, grammatical and vocabulary knowledge, in reading comprehension and further determine the dominant influence between grammatical and vocabulary knowledge. Samples of 40 EFL sixth semester students of Makassar Muhammadiyah University were selected by using the Simple Random Sampling Technique. The researcher obtained the data through proficiency tests of grammar and vocabulary and reading comprehension tests. The use of regression and correlation analysis is to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that the students' grammatical and vocabulary knowledge influence their reading comprehension significantly. Moreover, their grammatical schemata are more dominant than their vocabulary knowledge, showing the new aspect of this study from the latest research, i.e., the study of [6]. The result described that the schemata about grammar play a significant role in the EFL students' comprehension processing. The correlation analysis showed that the better grammatical competence students have, the better comprehension they do. Their understanding depended more on their competence about tenses (syntactic knowledge) than on their vocabulary knowledge. The contribution of this study is to give a new perspective about grammar and vocabulary schema in the EFL students using as cognitive structures in understanding English reading texts. It may also support developing a method that helps students use their linguistic knowledge to activate their background knowledge appropriately in understanding the different English reading texts.