An Investigation Of The Cultural Factors That Influence Vocational College English Reading

The research adopts the approach of quantitative study, and investigates the cultural factors that influence vocational college English reading of Chinese non-English majors in EFL reading. Based on Byram’s model of ICC, the author explores the general English reading barriers and problems in their English reading process by questionnaire which was designed according to those three research questions. And in this research, another instrument is final semester English examination scores in2011-2012semesters of the participants.In this research, seventy participants, from two different classes, of EFL learners of non-English majors were chosen from a vocational College of Zhejiang in China. The participants in a same college taught by the same teacher were selected as subjects for this study. After the data collection, the main quantitative data was analyzed with one-way ANOVA for internal factor analysis of each class’s ICC and four dimensions (cultural awareness, skills, knowledge and attitude) and independent samples T-test for the comparison of English reading scores with ICC and CA by the statistical software SPSS17.0.After the data analysis, many non-English majors in vocational colleges suffer from linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. Cultural factors as one of non-linguistic barriers are the predominant barriers in vocational college EFL reading. These findings suggest that the current vocational college English reading barriers of non-English majors have something to do with their lack of intercultural communicative competence. Furthermore, there are five aspects of cultural factors in all which are vocabulary barriers, idiom barriers, syntax barriers, discourse barriers and modes of thinking barriers caused by the cultural differences between English and Chinese respectively.Therefore, the EFL teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of the ICC and CA in the English reading process in daily EFL teaching. In addition, the researcher also provides some implications for language learning and teaching especially for the vocational college English reading of non-English majors and for further study and EFL teaching.