The Effect of Discipline-Related Knowledge on Heritage Language Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study explores the effect of prior discipline-related knowledge in reading comprehension for two groups of students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). The first group (G1), had 22 students enrolled in a general Spanish course and the second (G2), had 18 students enrolled in a course of Spanish for medical professions. The aim was to determine whether G2’s reading comprehension of a text related to medicine was better than G1’s. The instruments used were a lexical recognition test (LR) and a reading comprehension questionnaire (RC), both based on an article related to medicine. The former was used to verify the lexical baseline for both of these groups. From the results of the latter, we conclude that having prior thematic knowledge (in the area of medicine) had no effect on the understanding of this text. Additionally, at lower levels of lexical recognition (between 50% and 70%), the contribution of prior knowledge seemed to be greater, which could indicate that these students would greatly benefit from pre-reading activities that might activate previous knowledge or familiarize them with the topic.

Keywords

• discipline-related knowledge
• reading comprehension
• spanish
• heritage language
• lexical recognition