On the Cultural Schema and Iranian EFL Learners` Reading Performance: A Case of Local and Global Items
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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.
Abstract
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.
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