Cultural Context In Discourse Comprehension

There is a consensus in the field of linguistics that discourse comprehension can not be detached from the knowledge of cultural context. This thesis aims to explore "Cultural Context in Discourse Comprehension-From the Perspective of Narration".Discourse in the thesis is understood as the language in use. From the narrowest point of view, discourse is a unit of language above sentence level. From the functional perspective of language, discourse implies the understanding of how the language we use is based on the social environments in which it is used. In the broadest sense, the study of discourse has been linked with the research on communication.The author sees context as the physical environment in which a linguistic item is used. On the grounds of many scholars' notions, context tends to be classified into co-text, situational context and cultural context. Cultural context is a general concept which represents an abstract pattern of people' social activities. Cultural context implies all meanings that are expressed by discourses in certain society and culture, and comprises communicative purpose, communicative process, communicative pattern, communicative content and so forth.According to systemic-functional linguistics, every stratification of context corresponds to a stratum in the system of language. Cultural context corresponds to genre. Situational context corresponds to register. Co-text corresponds to language. Genre, a highly abstract concept that implies the structure with certain purpose and steps in the process of communication, is realized by the allocation of context in the lower stratum-register. And register is realized by the language in use, that is, discourse. From the perspective of cultural context, systemic-functional linguists suggest that every discourse belongs to a certaingenre, which means cultural context is realized through genre.Narration, a genre that plays an important part in people's life, is taken as the point of view in the thesis for the following two reasons. Firstly, for a long period of time every nation has a tradition or custom of telling stories. Narration discussed in the thesis is the written form of oral stories. Since it is shared among so many nations, this kind of genre is of generality. Secondly, owing to its own features, narration is of the nature of culture more than other kinds of genreOn the basis of the interrelation of cultural context and discourse comprehension, the thesis aims to explore the different aspects of understanding cultural context in narration by the people with the same cultural, but different educational background. By means of investigation and the analysis of first-hand data obtained from the self-designed questionnaire, the results are expected to provide guidance on the improvement of the input of British and American culture in EFL teaching.With the aid of statistical principles, a null hypothesis is made on the basis of the relationship between educational background and the understanding of cultural context in narration comprehension. Findings are observed through the analysis of standard deviation of descriptive statistics and of non-parametric correlations. First, there is difference among three groups of subjects with different educational background in understanding cultural context in discourse comprehension and the input of British and American culture in EFL teaching. Secondly, there is a negative correlation between educational background and the understanding of the interrelation of cultural context and discourse comprehension (correlation coefficient = -1.44, significance <2-tailed> = 0.33).The analysis of items in questionnaire is also made to explore the similarities and differences among three groups of subjects with the following findings:(1) Most subjects, no matter what educational background they have, are aware of the close relationship between culture and language.(2) A large number of subjects believe that having some knowledge ofBritish and American culture may...