The Difficulties of Reading Cultural-based Texts among Yemeni EFL Learners (original) (raw)
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PaperThe Difficulties of Reading Cultural-based Texts among Yemeni EFL Learners
International Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2020
Abstract The present study aimed at discovering the difficulties that level two students in the English Department, Faculty of Education, Sana'a University-Sana'a in reading comprehension when reading cultural-based texts. To achieve the study objectives, a test was administered in which participants were required to read two texts; one was cultural-based and the other was ordinary. The study method was descriptive. 51 participants were randomly selected from the whole population (180 students). The obtained data from the instrument was analyzed by calculating frequencies and paired sample t-test using SPSS program. The results revealed that even though students face difficulties when reading cultural texts, there is no significant statistical difference in their performance in the cultural based test and the ordinary one in the three subskills under investigation in this study (the main idea, guessing meaning from the text, and making inferences). Some recommendations were suggested. It was ended with some important recommendations related to its results in which teachers and learners should take into account enhancing and activating both of cultural and structural schemata.
Cogent Psychology, 2022
Learners’ perception of culture on receptive skills, more specifically on reading comprehension, has been an area facing a big challenge contemporarily. The current research aimed to investigate the cultural perception of Iranian EFL learners on reading comprehension ability. To conduct the study, an exploratory quantitative ex-post facto design (Dornyei, 2007) consisting of a questionnaire and interview study was used. Participants, 50 intermediate EFL learners (25 males, 25 females), were selected using the Oxford Placement Test. The participants were provided with two passages with different cultural contents (one containing Iranian culture and another containing culture of English-speaking countries). Then participants were required to fill in a Likert-scale questionnaire which was distributed through Google Form online platform. Also, an interview session was conducted to gather more detailed data. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded to find common themes. Analysis of interview and questionnaire data showed that learners hold similar cultural perceptions on reading comprehension ability, yet gender and social class have no significant impact on learners’ perceptions. The results of the study specified that Iranian EFL learners held a positive attitude towards the integration of cultural materials into reading passages to better comprehend the target language. Moreover, it was seen that gender and social class did not impact significantly learners’ cultural perceptions of English reading comprehension. The findings imply that ESL students with various reading levels or capabilities can learn from materials that are culturally diverse, specifically the ones at higher reading proficiency levels.
Exploring the Perceptions of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners about Reading Comprehension Ability
Learners' perception of culture on receptive skills more specifically on reading comprehension has been an area facing a big challenge contemporarily. The current research aimed to investigate the cultural perception of Iranian EFL learners on reading comprehension ability. To conduct the study, a mixed-methods design consisting of a questionnaire and interview study was used. Participants, 50 intermediate EFL learners (25 males, 25 females), were randomly selected using Oxford Placement Test. The participants were provided with two passages with different cultural contents (one containing Iranian culture and another containing culture of English spoken countries). Then participants were required to fill in a Likertscale questionnaire which was distributed through Google form online platform. Also, an interview session was conducted to gather more detailed data. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded to find common themes. Analysis of interview and questionnaire data showed that learners hold similar cultural perceptions on reading comprehension ability by gender and social class has no significant impact on learners' perceptions. The results of the study specified that Iranian EFL learners held a positive attitude towards the integration of cultural materials into reading passages to better comprehend the target language. Moreover, it was seen that gender and social class did not impact significantly learners' cultural perceptions of English reading comprehension. The findings imply that ESL students with various reading levels or capabilities can learn from materials that are culturally diverse, specifically the ones at higher reading proficiency levels.
Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2017
The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of cross cultural background knowledge on Iranian EFL learners' reading comprehension at low and advanced levels of language proficiency. The present study was done in two phases: Treatment and evaluation. Sixty students at low and advanced levels of language proficiency took part in the present study. After administering the proficiency test, a pretest of reading comprehension, including 30 multiple choice questions, was administered for each group for comparison to post test scores. During the treatment, the researcher made the low and advanced students familiar with target cultural values and norms. After treatment, all participants took the posttests. The researcher compared the scores of pre and posttests of each group to consider the effects of cross cultural background knowledge on reading comprehension of learners at low and advanced levels. The results of Paired sample t test indicated that cross cultural backgroun...
Nativized Texts: Cultural Clues' Role in Improving EFL Undergraduates' Reading Comprehension
Universal Journal of Educational Research, 2020
Even though many studies were carried out regarding the role of cultural background knowledge in reading comprehension, still rare studies were carried in the surrounding area. Accordingly, this study aimed at exploring the potential effect of cultural clues on Al al-Bayt University undergraduates' reading comprehension at three levels: literal, inferential, and evaluative. To achieve this, seven passages, each with two versions: the original and nativized, were selected from the textbook taught at Al al-Bayt University, situated in Mafraq in the north of Jordan. The researcher used pre-experimental design (i.e., One-group pretest-posttest design). In this design, a single case is observed at two-time points (repeated measures), one before the treatment (O1), and one after the treatment (O2). Subjects were thirty-eight EFL undergraduates selected by the researcher from Al al-Bayt University in the second semester of the academic year 2019/2020.To carry out the study, all expressions and clues that carry cultural aspects in the original passages were replaced by other expressions reflecting the Jordanian culture in the nativized ones. The students then were asked to read the two versions and answer different types of questions to collect the data aimed at measuring literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension over the two versions of each passage. The collected data were analyzed using quantitative analyses. The study's findings revealed that cultural familiarity through applying nativization positively affected students' reading comprehension. More interesting is that text nativization did affect the literal level of comprehension and the inferential and evaluative ones. The current study would be fruitful for instructors and teachers in Jordan to help them develop reading comprehension in a way that would improve students' comprehension.
—This study investigates the causes of the reading difficulty as perceived by undergraduate and postgraduate EFL learners. 34 postgraduate and 36 undergraduate students at the University of Isfahan took part in this study. In particular, this study tries to know whether there is any difference between the perceptions of these two groups of learners. A questionnaire synthesized Eskey (1986), and Bernhardt (1991), cited in Lin (2002), was used as the main instrument for analysis of knowledge categories affecting reading comprehension. The questionnaire considered three general categories of linguistic, conceptual and socio-cultural knowledge as the building blocks of reading. It consists of four multiple-choice questions, all accepting multiple responses. The results of the frequency analysis showed that postgraduate students, with higher level of language proficiency, attached less importance to linguistic knowledge as the factor helping reading comprehension success, but most importance to socio-cultural and conceptual knowledge. With the decrease of linguistic knowledge; however, undergraduates attached better reading comprehension to linguistic knowledge rather than socio-linguistic and conceptual knowledge.
The present study investigated the effect of cross-cultural background knowledge on Iranian EFL learners' reading comprehension ability. To do this, sixty female EFL learners between 17 and 19 years of age were selected at a private language institute in Sabzevar based on their scores in language proficiency test and were randomly assigned to two groups of thirty. In order to determine homogeneity of students, a Nelson test was administered to the groups before any treatment. The teacher presented ten reading passages with the cultural content in both control and experimental groups. During the experiment, the teacher made her students familiar with target culture. On the other hand, the students in Control group did not enjoy any of the advantages of cultural warm-up activities which were designed to activate the cross-cultural background knowledge of students in Experimental group. At the end of this treatment, the two groups took a post-test to see whether the treatment had any influence on their reading comprehension ability. The post-test was piloted already. The results of the post-test showed that the groups performed differently on the post-test, which indicated that familiarity with specific culturally-oriented language reading text would improve Iranian EFL learners’ reading comprehension ability.
Journal of Pan Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics, 2011
Reading skill has taken on an important role in most EFL teaching situations. While linguistic knowledge is only one aspect of this skill, background knowledge including culture can also play an important role (Alptekin, 2006; Johnson, 1981; Pritchard, 1990; Steffensen, Chitra, & Anderson, 1979). This study investigated the effect of cultural background or cultural schema on the performance of Iranian EFL students on local (bottom-up) and global (top-down) processes. Sixty-six female pre-university students took part in the study. They read five texts with familiar cultural themes and five texts with culturally unfamiliar topics (total=10). The multiple-choice items were designed in a way to test both bottom-up processing (word recognition, literal comprehension and finding referents of pronouns) and top-down processing (making inferences, skimming, scanning, etc). The findings showed that our students performed significantly better on local items compared with global items both for (un)familiar texts. It was also observed that their overall performance was mostly influenced by text familiarity. Their higher scores on local items can be explained by the fact that these items are totally easier to process due to the linguistic context available. In contrast, the difficulty of the global items can be explained because our EFL learners need extra linguistic knowledge to process such items. Also, this difference could be attributed to the teaching situation in which language teachers do not teach students how to read at all and learners are not familiar with higher-level, global processes being important in reading comprehension.
The Relationship between Cultural Background and Reading Comprehension
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2014
This study was an attempt to investigate the relationship between cultural background of Iranian EFL learners and reading comprehension. 45 Iranian language learners majoring in TEFL and English language translation from three different ethnicities in different provinces were selected through purposive sampling. All participants received three different reading comprehension sub-tests: a reading sub-test including culturally familiar topics and two reading sub-tests with culturally unfamiliar topics. The results showed that the means of all groups on culturally familiar reading tests were greater than their means on reading tests with unfamiliar contents.