| This empirical study evaluates the factors that influence Korean students' reading comprehension of culturally embedded texts (CETs) in the US. CETs contain US socio-cultural facts and their meanings that represent native speakers' beliefs, norms, and values in their daily lives. Without having prior knowledge of US culture, it was not easy for Korean students to interpret and finally comprehend the texts in the US.; Through this study, I found that the most important factors influencing the Korean students' comprehension of CETS are their lack of US cultural knowledge, US culture-embedded lexical knowledge, and unfamiliarity with CETs. Their lack of cultural knowledge caused them to misunderstand concepts and values and to interpret meaning of words differently. Lack of US culture-embedded words prevented the students from drawing multiple-meanings of words depending on contexts. Meaning differences and specific contextual vocabulary words are major factors in explaining Korean students' reading problems in comprehending US culture-embedded texts. Finally, they lack experiences reading English documents or texts outside the classroom in Korea. Their unfamiliarity with CETs had effects on their lack of schema, which influence their comprehension. The Korean students' US cultural background knowledge and textual information of CETs are inseparable for the students to comprehend CETs.; The results of this study show that Korean students need to develop L2 cultural knowledge in developing schema by reading different US culture-embedded texts. In addition, to make appropriate meaning from the texts, the students need to improve reading strategies applying their knowledge to the US-based contexts. And they also need to develop specific lexical knowledge applied to the culture-embedded texts. |
