An Investigation Into The Influence Of Cultural Background Knowledge On Teaching Reading Of Senior High School

Reading comprehension occupies an increasingly large proportion in examiningEnglish learners’ comprehensive ability. As a result, teaching of reading comprehension hasrecently attracted more attention than ever before, which makes its status in senior highschools become particularly important. Introduction of various cultural background penetratesin more than one version of textbooks with purposes of helping students understand better theBritish and American customs, history, geography, and other certain knowledge. As aconsequence, it plays a positive role in support of the teaching of reading comprehension.However, in practical teaching reading comprehension, many teachers emphasistoo much on vocabulary and grammar knowledge, neglecting the important role of thecultural background knowledge in teaching reading comprehension at senior high, sothat the students’ development of skill on reading comprehension subjects to certainrestrictions. They often do not understand the articles’ background knowledge by simplyunderstanding the passage literally from the words, the sentences. So they can’t have athorough comprehension of the passage.This paper pinpoints the importance of the positive effects played by culturalbackground knowledge in teaching English particularly in the teaching of readingcomprehension at senior high schools through empirical studies aiming at providing apositive reference for those high school teachers working at the first-line of Englishteaching. After a lot of reference to the relevant literature and research, this paperconclude as follows:（1）The knowledge of cultural background knowledge has aninfluence on students’ English learning a lot.（2）It is beneficial to improve the students’reading ability if teachers can apply cultural background knowledge to teach readingcomprehension. According to the findings, this paper has put forward some specificmeasures targeted and can be operated in a practical classroom reading teaching in orderto improve the ability of students’ English reading comprehension at senior high, thusenhancing their ability of communicating in English.