Cultural Background Knowledge And English Reading: A Study Of High School Students' Cultural Background Knowledge In English Learning

It is well known that reading is of decisive importance in English learning. English syllabus for senior high school takes reading ability as the first priority in four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. How to improve reading ability is a goal for language learners. It is agreed that improvement of reading ability depends on linguistic competence, reading strategy, affective factor, prior knowledge, positive transfer of mother tongue on foreign language and so on, while cultural background knowledge plays a vital part to some extent. Cultural background knowledge is defined as properties of geography, history, economy, education, political institution, custom, art, religion, way of life, social tradition, etiquette, etc, in a given country from a broad viewpoint. When we do some reading, cultural background knowledge related can facilitate reading difficulty. At present, many researches about cross cultural teaching have been lasting for a long time, and it is nowadays a commonplace in language learning to stress the importance of cultural teaching ,but cultural teaching in language class has remained quite limited in practice. The purpose of this article is to study high school students' cultural background knowledge in English learning and to draw more attention from teachers and students to the importance of cultural background knowledge in reading comprehension.In detail, the thesis aims to investigate :(1) theoretically, what the influence of cultural background knowledge makes on reading comprehension, (2)practically, what students know about cultural background knowledge and (3)what the implications are for students and teachers.In order to find answers to these questions, a research instrument- a quiz was administered to the subjects.The results of this study are: (1) the students focus more attention on knowledge from textbooks than on extracurricular information. (2) the students learn too little about implicit cultural background knowledge some words connote in the textbooks.(3)the students' linguistic competence is poor.The findings highlight the necessity of cultural background in reading comprehension, and provide some implications for English learning in the future.