A Tentative Study Of The Relationship Between Culture Shock And Reading Comprehension Of English Majors In China

According to Schumann's Acculturation Model, second language acquisition is only a by-product of acculturation, and how well a person acculturates to the target language culture determines how much a person can learn about his/her second language. In addition, Schumann asserts that it is the social distance and psychological distance that cause the difference of acculturation levels of second language learners. In ideal second language learning settings, social distance plays a major role in one's acculturation level, and psychological distance affect foreign language learning more because in foreign language learning circumstances social distance is not a variable anymore.In China, English learning is under the category of foreign language learning rather than second language learning, and for most Chinese learners of English, social distance between their native language and their target language is already set. In this way, the psychological distance plays a major part in their learning process, which means that the greater the psychological distance, the harder the English language learning for Chinese learners. Therefore, teachers in China should dedicate to the lessening of the psychological distance between Chinese learners of English and English language in order to improve their English proficiency by teaching culture in reading class.Since 1970s, researchers both at home and abroad have studied the possibility of applying Acculturation Model to language teaching, and some achievements have already been made, in which four factors (language shock, culture shock, motivation and ego-permeability) affecting psychological distance have all been studied. In these studies, language shock is treated as a set factor, and not many researches have been focusing on it. Motivation is among the most studied subjects and many surveys and researches have been published about it. Ego-permeability is too individual and can hardly be investigated collectively. For culture shock, most published papers concern its theoretical importance rather than conducting a research to study its influence. What's more, most of the researches on culture shock do not take English majors as their concern, what they are choosing as subjects are non-English majors. All these contributed to the decision to find out whether culture shock exists in English majors, and to have a comprehensive knowledge about the status quo of the acculturation level of English majors. Based on the study, the research endeavored to find out the relationship between culture shock and reading comprehension.In this study,35 junior students majoring in English from the School of English Language, Literature and Culture of Beijing International Studies University were randomly chosen as subjects. They were asked to finish a reading comprehension test, a questionnaire to assess their acculturation level, and some follow-up questions to investigate whether culture shock exists among English majors. The research confirmed the existence of culture shock in foreign language learning setting, and proved that its existence lead to low acculturation level of English majors. At the same time, the research also suggested that there was a positive but weak link between acculturation level and scores in reading comprehension test and Test for English Majors-Band 4 (TEM-4), though higher acculturation level scores did not necessarily lead to better scores in reading comprehension or TEM-4. After analyses of the data, some guidelines and practical techniques for culture teaching were proposed to include culture teaching in reading class, motivating further researches for a comprehensive application of Acculturation Model to teaching reading to English majors.