The Impact Of Culture On Language Understanding From Reading Class

The new English curriculum criteria for high schools (2003) stated that the training for the students' reading ability should be strengthened. As a result, both teachers and students have paid more attention to improving reading ability. Having done much reading and lots of reading exercises, the students still find their reading ability dissatisfactory. Of course, their language ability is one of the causes, reading can't go without knowing a certain number of words, phrases, sentences and sentence structures. But, as a kind of cognitive activity, reading is a process in which verbal and non-verbal factors interact with and influence upon each other. To achieve high grades, the students need language itself as well as non-verbal factors. So, to improve the students' reading ability, we should focus as much on the language as on the non-verbal ability. The non-verbal ability refers to the habit of thinking, cultural background knowledge of the related countries, reading habits, reading skills and so on, among which culture is of vital importance in understanding a language. In other words, culture impediments will cause trouble in reading.Communication impediment, which includes two aspects: written and oral work, is actually caused by culture. There are more oral communication impediments, but they're comparatively easier to get rid of. Because the two sides can directly and quickly find and remove them by asking questions, through their body language, contexts, instructions and something like that. There are relatively fewer written obstacles, but compared to oral ones, they're harder to eliminate. There's a time lag between the reader and the author, and the communication between the two is indirect.Once the author finishes his writing and it is used as the reading material, the connotation of the language and its culture have been fixed. Readers can only rely on the language he himself comprehends, the culture knowledge he has to interpret the language the author uses. So students often encounter culture impediments. And quite often they have difficulty removing them, which makes it harder for them to identify and eliminate the culture impediments.Culture is one of the main impediments the Chinese students have when reading. People have realized the important role culture knowledge plays in reading. So the study of culture impediments is of vital importance to improve the students' reading ability as well as to facilitate the development of the teaching of reading; and to train the students' ability of cross-cultural communication.This essay analyzes some culture impediments the students often come across when reading; surveys how well the teachers and students know about culture. From the survey, some advice on how to improve the teaching of reading is also provided. It is hoped that the essay can help the students realize how important it is to know about culture while they read; and that more English teachers can pay closer attention to the input of culture in their teaching so as to increase the students' ability in cross-cultural communication.