An Investigation Of Major Factors Influencing Literature Reading Of English Majors

Literature reading is one of the least studied fields in traditional literary criticism. In fact, reading plays a significant role in reconstructing meaning of the literary text in respect that it is indispensable to literary appreciation. However, difficulties are likely to occur in cross-cultural reading activities owing to such factors as cultural differences, language barriers and so on. Hereby, this thesis aims to investigate major factors influencing literature reading in a cross-cultural context. Exactly speaking, this thesis concentrates on major factors involved in foreign literature reading of the English Majors. Questionnaire and interview were performed in this research. Investigation showed that such factors as readers' interest, motivation, attitude, vocabulary, syntactic ability, semantic ability, strategic ability, context, culture, teacher and mother tongue do to some extent exert an influence on literature reading.Reading with interest involves the active interaction with the text so as to construct text meaning. It is endowed with the potential possibility to facilitate energetic thinking, courageous guesses, flexible application of what readers have acquired to the exploration of new information. Literature reading, being possessed of peculiar characteristics for critical reading and appreciation, largely depends on readers' interest for reconstructing text meaning. However, what readers are mostly interested in is the story relating to such themes as love, legend and myth rather than other literary genres, indicating that there is a lack of interest toward foreign literature reading among EFL learners. Motivation is commonly thought of as an inner drive, impulse, emotion, or desire that moves one to a particular action. Although it is divided into instrumental motivation and enjoymental motivation in this research claiming that readers' enjoymental motivation is stronger than their instrumental motivation, they are not mutually exclusive but permeating with each other in literature reading in the sense thatreading activated by enjoymental motivation may to some degree satisfy the expectations of reading activated by instrumental motivation. Attitude, as a psychological tendency, also affects literature reading. Data showed that under current circumstances, readers' negative attitude is stronger than positive attitude, characterized by readers' mechanical reading and passive reception of the text meaning. In comparison, positive reading focuses on the exploration of the implied meanings besides the prepositional meanings through active interaction with the text for meaning reconstruction. Hence, "PADRC" reading strategy is suggested in this thesis to step up readers' interest and creativity in literature reading.Besides, readers' vocabulary, syntactic ability, semantic ability to deduce meanings from the context, and strategic ability have an impact on literature reading as well. Few of them (16.4%) have predominated adequate vocabulary to promote literature reading and many of them (28.6%) do have difficulty in identifying the lexical connotations or implied meanings of the author. Investigation of strategy employment also indicated that readers are not necessarily skilled in applying reading strategies to literature reading although many of them do employ certain strategies such as syntactic analysis to help them obtain the propositional meanings of the text. However, such strategies as making summaries, commenting on the text and so on, which in effect are accordant to the nature of literature reading, are undervalued. Only few students (7.8%) choose to make English summaries on what they have read, implying that hardly does there exist a reflective reading or critical reading among EFL learners and literature appreciation just rests at the surface level seeking for interesting propositional meanings.Moreover, literature, as the author's performance with words to achieve certain purposes as well as the author's imaginary creation, is likely to bring about inconsistence between the lit...