How to Improve Your Reading Ability

English learners like you could use schema theory to improve your reading ability by activating your prior knowledge and making connections to the text. For example, before reading a news article about climate change, you could brainstorm what you already know about the topic. Bottom up processing explains how individuals process information starting from the individual components building up to a complete understanding. Top-down processing suggests that you use your existing knowledge and experience to make sense of new information. Research has shown that using top-down processing can improve comprehension by enabling you to make predictions about the content of the text.