The Effect of Formal Schema on Korean EFL Readers’ TOEFL and IELTS Reading

This study investigated the influence of formal schema on Korean adult EFL learners’ reading comprehension performance on TOEFLand IELTS-type tasks, considering learners’ proficiency levels. Participants were 110 university students (47 female, 63 male) in Korea, who possessed valid TOEIC scores but had not received formal TOEFL or IELTS instruction. Based on TOEIC reading scores, participants were divided into two proficiency groups. Over a one-month intervention, learners completed a three-stage repeated-passages assessment comprising a pre-test (no schema activation), post-test 1 (content-schema activation), and post-test 2 (content + formal-schema activation), using researcher-adapted multiple-choice reading measures modeled on TOEFL and IELTS. The results revealed that (1) formal-schema support - particularly lexical and semantic knowledge - was associated with substantial comprehension gains beyond topic familiarity, although its independent effect could not be isolated due to the cumulative design; (2) the facilitative effect did not significantly differ between TOEFL and IELTS tasks; and (3) the pattern of improvement was consistent across proficiency levels. These findings highlight the value of integrating explicit instruction in rhetorical and discourse organization into academic reading assessment preparation and EFL reading pedagogy.