The Effects Of Cultural Differences On EFL Reading Comprehension

One problem in foreign language teaching continues to be of critical importance: students make comprehension mistakes when reading English texts. This kind of understanding error or comprehension barriers is closely related to the cultural differences reflected by Chinese and English languages. Foreign language reading comprehension is, in fact, a cross-cultural communication event, and students' familiarity with the target culture is the premise of successful EFL reading comprehension. In the process of foreign Language reading comprehension, readers' task is not just to acquire knowledge, but more importantly, to communicate cross-culturally with the writer and critically absorb the cultural heritage in the target language.In recent years, more and more English teachers and learners have realized the importance of culture in the learning and teaching of foreign Languages; however there are still quite a number of teachers who, in the process of teaching reading, emphasize only language itself and neglect the cultural knowledge of the text. Obviously this method of teaching is not very helpful in improving students' ability to comprehend the text. Actually, many English learners might not understand what a sentence means or what a paragraph is about even though they understand every single word and all the grammatical structures in the sentence or the paragraph. This phenomenon can be explained as a result of English learners' ignorance of the social cultural implications and backgrounds of the English language.For the purpose of improving the teaching of reading comprehension and students' reading ability, and making students aware that cultural knowledge plays a vital role in text comprehension, this thesis first analyzes the comprehension barriers Chinese students encounter when reading English texts, and proves that these comprehension barriers all belong to cultural barriers. This thesis then illustrates the importance of cultural factors in text comprehension on the basis of research in this field done by scholars home and abroad since 1970s; it analyzes,from the perspective of schema theory, the effects of the three types of cultural schema-content schema, formal schema and linguistic schema on EFL reading comprehension. Next the thesis illustrates in detail, from the perspective of the relationship between language and culture, the effects of cultural differences on EFL reading comprehension in terms of vocabulary, sentences and texts, and points out that cultural differences can affect every aspect of comprehension. This thesis finally explores some methods to help students overcome cultural barriers, concludes that the effects of cultural differences on text comprehension exist not only at the advanced level of language learning but at the beginning level as well, and further stresses the role of cultural background knowledge on EFL reading comprehension.