| This experimental study aimed to investigate whether cultural schemata and goal orientations would influence adult EFL readers' use of on-line reading strategies and their reading comprehension. Thirty-eight English-major college freshmen enrolled in a Taiwan university participated in this study. Goal-orientation treatments directed students to adopt a mastery or a performance goal. Students read silently two English essays that described a culturally familiar event, Chinese New Year, and a culturally unfamiliar event, St. Patrick's Day. As they read silently, students were instructed to think out loud. After reading, students were asked to perform stimulated recall and to take a reading comprehension assessment to measure their reading comprehension.; The taxonomy of on-ling reading processing strategies included six different strategy categories and a total of 28 strategies. The results of two-way ANOVAs (a 2 x 2 split-plot factorial design) indicated the cultural schemata and goal orientations influenced the frequencies of students' using strategies of processing intra-sentential comprehension, processing inter-paragraph comprehension, activating background knowledge, and accepting ambiguities. The interaction effects of cultural schemata and goal orientations contributed to the differences in the frequencies of the use of accepting ambiguity strategies. The culturally familiar essay was comprehended better when compared to the culturally unfamiliar essay. The combined mastery- and performance-orientation group achieved better comprehension on both essays. Implications for EFL reading instruction include: (a) the significance of readers' cultural schemata and goal-orientation should not be neglected, and (b) the appropriate manner of employing on-line reading strategies should be taught. |
