An Investigation Of The Effects Of Cultural Background Knowledge On English Reading Of Senior High School Students

Reading is the most important purpose and means of language teaching.It plays a very important role in the process of Second Language Acquisition(SLA). So reading comprehension is receiving more and more attention inhigh school English teaching. However, many students have difficulties inobtaining the overall meaning of texts in English reading class, although theyhave known all the meaning of the words and the rules of grammar. Fromsome theories, we know that the ability to understand texts is based not onlyon the reader’s linguistic knowledge, but also on his or her general knowledgeof the world and the extent to which that knowledge is activated during themental process of reading. It suggests that students should be provided withinformation about Western cultural background, including customs, ways ofthinking, values, beliefs, etc. through reading training.In this paper, a quiz and questionnaire were carried to the subjects to findout the present situation of cultural instruction in English reading class, whichincludes the attitudes of students and teachers towards cultural instruction, theobstacles and teachers’ roles in cultural instruction in reading class and theways how students gain culture knowledge. The author also tries tosummarize some factors that influence the cultural instruction in readingcomprehension to draw more attention from teachers and students to theimportance of cultural background knowledge in reading comprehension.The results of this study convey the message that students’ learning isrestricted to the language knowledge and they lack the cultural backgroundknowledge. In detail, they are:1) the students focus more attention onknowledge from textbooks than on extracurricular information;2) thestudents learn too little implicit cultural background knowledge some words connote in the textbooks;3) although the students have many ways to acquirethe culture knowledge, they are likely to learn it in class, so it is restricted bythe teacher’s proficiency of knowledge in this field.As a senior school English teacher, the author hopes this study canprovide some suggestions for English learning in the future: l) Teachersshould change the old teaching concept, and pay equal attention to thelanguage knowledge and cultural knowledge;2) Teachers should change theteaching method, and emphasize the cross-cultural and communicationteaching;3) Teachers should improve the teaching method with the aid ofmedia，and broaden the channel of cultural background knowledge input;4)Students should broaden their mind, and increase the chance of cross-culturalknowledge input;5) Teachers and student should work together, and select thecultural background material with strong authenticity，and cultivate students’ability to read material independently.