An Investigation Of Cross-cultural Background Knowledge On English Reading Of Senior High School Students

One problem in foreign language teaching continues to be of critical importance: students make comprehension mistakes when reading English texts. This kind of understanding error or comprehension barrier is closely related to the cultural differences reflected by Chinese and English languages. Foreign language reading comprehension is in fact a cross-cultural communication event, and students'familiarity with the target culture is the premise of successful EFL reading comprehension. In the process of foreign language reading comprehension, readers'task is not only to acquire knowledge, but more importantly, to communicate cross-culturally with the writer and critically absorb the cultural heritage in the target language. Many learners might not understand what a sentence means or what a paragraph is about even though they understand every single word and all the grammatical structures in the sentence or the paragraph. This phenomenon can be explained as a result of English learners'ignorance of the social cultural implications and backgrounds of the English language.In recent years, more and more English teachers and learners have realized the importance of culture in the learning and teaching of foreign languages, however there are still quite a number of teachers in the process of teaching reading, emphasize only language itself and neglect the cultural knowledge of the text. Obviously this method of teaching is not very helpful in improving students'ability to comprehend the text.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 thesis 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 in reading comprehension.In detail, the thesis aims to investigate: (1) theoretically, what the influenceof cultural background makes on reading comprehension, (2) practically, what students know about cultural background and (3) what the implications are for students and teachers.In order to find answers to these questions, a research instrument --- a quiz and questionnaire were carried to the subjects, who are all from WeiHai senior high schools– No.1, No. 2 and No. 4 middle school. The quiz test covers the knowledge of history, custom, geography, literature, religion and political system of the English–speaking countries.The results of this study convey the message that student'learning are restricted to the language knowledge, they lack the cultural background knowledge. In detail, they are: (1) the students focus more attention on knowledge from textbooks than on extracurricular information. (2) the students learn too little implicit cultural background knowledge some words connote in the textbooks. (3) the sources of students'leaning cultural background knowledge are limited , and restricted by the teacher's proficiency of knowledge in this field.The findings highlight the necessity of cultural background in reading comprehension, and provide some implications for English learning in the future. (1) Change the old teaching concept, paying equal attention to the language knowledge and cultural knowledge. (2) Change the teaching method, highlighting the cross-cultural and communication teaching. (3) Encourage students to learn through cooperation, increasing the chance of cross-cultural knowledge exchange. (4) Better the teaching with the aid of media, broadening the channel of cultural background knowledge input. (5) Select the culture background material with strong authenticity for use to read, cultivating students'ability to read independently.