Abstract
The study in hand attempted to investigate Saudi male and female EFL university teachers to record their responses towards the role of content schemata and appropriate classroom techniques in increasing learners' reading comprehension. Two hundred one participants (n = 201) were given a self-developed strongly-agree to strongly-disagree Likert-scale questionnaire to generate data. Relevant studies were thoroughly reviewed to develop the questionnaire for this empirical study. The standard procedures were adopted to achieve content validity and reliability of the instrument. The final version of the questionnaire was administered to one hundred twenty-eight female (n = 128) and seventy-three male (n = 73) EFL university teachers. Independent-samples T-test was run to analyze data to generate descriptive statistics and comparative analyses along gender lines. Extremely high mean values indicate that both groups of the participants consider content schemata extremely important in enhancing reading comprehension. It is found that highlighting thesis statement, main idea, signal words, important phrases, titles and subtitles to the learners are the most important schemata developing techniques. The comparative analyses revealed that the male cohort of the study has assigned comparatively higher mean values to the majority items. The comparative results partially accepted all three hypotheses set for this investigation indicating that there does not exist statistically significant gender-based differences in the perceived preferences towards the role of content schemata, schemata developing strategies and classroom challenges in this regard.
Key words: schemata; reading skills; strategies; challenges; comprehension