A Research On The Influence Of Cultural Insight On Reading Comprehension

The study on English reading is very popular. During the course of teaching, there arevarious forms of practice has been put to improve the reading abilities of students. ManyEnglish teachers have been engaged in cultivating students’ interests, impartingknowledge, and even strengthening the practical ability of students. Though a lot ofstudents have grasped a large amount of vocabulary and perfect grammar, they couldneither read easily and smoothly, nor seize the contents of readings. Their reading abilitiesare not steady. Actually, it has entered a bottleneck period of study and practice. Therefore,it is hard to find a breakthrough from language skills. But cultivating students’ culturalabilities become a sally spot for teachers to choose.In this research, the author applies the theory of Hofstede’s five dimensions of nationalculture as the guidance of the study. With the questionnaires and the Language TestingMethods, the author studies the weaknesses of cultural background and deficiencies ofcultural insight during reading comprehension. Through the investigations and the analysisof the questionnaires, the author summarizes the influencing cultural factors on Englishreading comprehension. Based on the data and the circumstances in the research, theauthor analyzes how to improve the ability of students’ reading comprehension, anddiscusses how to watch，think, examine or distinguish, even to explore the abilities ofcultural phenomena. Thus, the thesis makes a discussion on the methods to develop thestudents’ comprehensive ability.Through the research, the author has a general idea of students’ situation of theirreading comprehension, and finds the problems that exist in it. According to theweaknesses of cultural reading and lack of cultures-considering, the author theoreticallyproposes a term “cultural insight”, and puts it into practice. At last, the thesis summarizesit into five important measures to enhance the cultural insight. They are: increasing thesensitivity of cultural difference; respecting and tolerating for different cultures;improving language skills; using language strategies flexibly; and cultivating thecross-cultural ability.