The Relationship between the Reading Ability of English Major Students and Cultural Background.doc

毕业论文(设计)The Relationship between the Reading Ability of English Major Students and Cultural Background1. Introduction12. Definitions of Culture33. Some researchers of the reading53.1 Reading is a complex process63.2 The reading ability73.2.1 Reading speed73.2.2 Understanding83.2.3 Reading endurance84. Reading models84.1 The bottom-up model84.2 The interactive model94.3 The top-down model95. Experiment105.1 Participants105.2 Designs and materials105.3 Procedures115.4 Results125.5 The significance of cultivating cultural background136. Conclusion14References161. Introduction As English major students, we have acquired enough vocabularies to read foreign articles, newspapers and foreign works. But actually we have some difficulties in understanding some phrases and sentences of which vocabularies are quite familiar to us. Cultural background knowledge can, to a great extent, hold up the improvement of English reading and become a noticeable problem. Presentation of cultural background is the proposed solution to the problem. And English major students reading ability is not only due to how easy or difficult a text is but more depends on the level of students recall from their cultural background knowledge and from the contextual clues about cultural origins as well as college students and high middle students. (Carrell, 1984; Carrell, 1987; Floyd and Carrell,1987). This thesis concludes the study of the relationship between the reading ability of English major students and cultural background and emphasizes the importance of cultural background knowledge in English reading teaching. Meanwhile, using cultural background knowledge instructs the students in English reading teaching, which can increase the teaching quality and reading efficiency of English major students and non-English major students in English reading teaching. Students may experience difficulty or lose their interests while reading some cross-cultural materials if their background knowledge has not been introduced. With warm-up cultural hints of a story, a quick figure and readers expectations to the story may elicit their interests and enhance their reading comprehension. Moreover, a number of studies gave evidence that giving students cross-cultural literature can raise students general cultural background knowledge and reading competence. Gajdusek (1988) explored the idea that adding literature in the language program to improve reading proficiency could be more helpful than just using academic texts. Azabdaftary (1992) found that English novels and short stories provided English major students subconscious acquisition to close the big gap between linguistic theories and language reading teaching. In addition, literature in English can easily be used to cultivate reading ability. Brock (1990) found three components of successful reading comprehension through literature readings: students background knowledge, students interests, and students language proficiency. Furthermore, extensive reading was examined in the preceding studies as a powerful approach to construct readers cultural background knowledge. Green (2005) asserted that extensive reading should be completely merged into the language curriculum for second language acquisition. Instead of full-length books, he suggested that a number of thematically linking mini-texts could be exploited far more effectively. Next, a sum of studies indicated that students could gradually obtain more cultural background incidentally by reading extensively; the reading materials of cultural background should be highly possible selections (Tse, 1996; Tran, 2006; Greenberg, Rodrigo and Berry, 2006). The preceding studies indicated the positive impacts of cultural background knowledge towards reading comprehension. However, how cultural background knowledge influences reading comprehension and how teachers facilitate his or her students to raise their cultural awareness, therefore this question becomes the main questions in this experiment. The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of cultural background knowledge upon students reading comprehension. A quick in-class construction of cultural background knowledge is hence hypothesized as a big help for cultural reading comprehension.2. Definitions of Culture Culture is defined as the shared patterns of behaviors and interactions, cognitive constructs, and affective understanding that are learned through a process of socialization. These shared patterns identify the members of a culture group while also distinguishing those of another group. Most social scientists today view culture as consisting primarily of the symbolic, ideational, and intangible aspects of human societies. The essence of a culture is not its artifacts, tools, or other tangible cultural elements but how the members of the group interpret, use, and perceive them. It is the values, symbols, interpretations, and perspectives that distinguish one people from another in modernized societies; it is not material objects and other tangible aspects of human societies. People within a culture usually interpret the meaning of symbols, artifacts, and behaviors in the same or in similar ways.Culture learned and shared human patterns or models for living. These patterns and models pervade all aspects of human social interaction. Culture is mankinds primary adaptive mechanism.Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another. Culture means all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and non rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behavior of men. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the other hand, be considered as products of action. Culture is the shared knowledge and schemes created by a set of people for perceiving, interpreting, expressing, and responding to the social realities around themA culture is a configuration of learned behaviors and results of behavior whose component elements are shared and transmitted by the members of a particular society.Culture consists of those patterns relative to behavior and the products of human action which may be inherited, that is, passed on from generation to generation. Culture has been defined in a number of ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared behavior of a community of interacting human beings (Net. 1).3. Some researchers of the reading For many years, three basic definitions of reading have driven literacy programs in the United States. According to the first definition, learning to read means learning to pronounce words. According to the second definition, learning to read means learning to identify words and get their meanings. According to the third definition, learning to read means learning to bring meaning to a text in order to get meaning from it. Although these definitions reflect long-standing views of reading, current literacy research supports a more comprehensive definition of reading. This new definition includes all of the above definitions and places learning skills in the context of authentic reading and writing activities. It recognizes the importance of skill instruction as one piece of the reading process (Net. 2). Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening (Net. 3).3.1 Reading is a complex processIf you could recapture your mental processing, you would notice that you read with reference to a particular world of knowledge and experiences relating to the text. The text evoked voices, memories, knowledge, and experiences from other times and placessome long dormant, some more immediate. If you were reading complex text about complex ideas or an unfamiliar type of text, you were working to understand it, your reading were likely characterized by many false starts and much backtracking. You were probably trying to relate it to your existing knowledge and understanding. You might have stumbled over unfamiliar words and found yourself trying to interpret them from the context. And you might have found yourself having an internal conversation with the author, silently agreeing or disagreeing with what you read. As experienced students read, they begin to generate a mental representation, or the gist of the text, which serves as an evolving framework for understanding subsequent parts of the text. As they read further, they test this evolving meaning and monitor their understandings, paying attention to inconsistencies that arise as they interact with the text. If they notice they are losing the meaning as they read, they draw on a variety of strategies to readjust their understandings. They come to texts with purposes that guide their reading, taking a stance toward the text and responding to the ideas that take shape in the conversation between the text and the self. While reading a newspaper analysis of global hostilities, for example, you may silently argue with its presentation of facts, question the assertions of the writer, and find yourself revisiting heated debates with friends over U.S. foreign policy. You may picture events televised during earlier wars. Lost in your recollections, you may find that even though your eyes have scanned several paragraphs, you have taken nothing in, so you reread these passages, this time focusing on analysis. Therefore, it is proved that reading is a complex process.3.2 The reading ability Reading ability means readers understand the literal meaning of the text through receiving information of word marks, using knowledge of lexicology and grammar. There are three basic parameters for reading ability.3.2.1 Reading speed Reading speed is individual and varies a great deal. Limited by field of vision and also by the degree of magnification, contrast, light and color composition. A reader without any visual impairment normally reads between 250-300 words per minute. A person with impaired vision normally reads between 30-100 words per minute. Over 300 words per minute are considered to be fast reading.3.2.2 Understanding Understanding what you read may sound obvious. Everybody who reads a page or a chapter of a book, however, is well aware that sometimes you have to re-read a section when concentration wanes for a moment. When a user sits in front of a monitor screen and at the same time as reading, must operate the camera, many other factors come into disturb his or her concentration (movements, changes of position, etc.). 3.2.3 Reading endurance All experienced students know how tiring it can be to lie and read a thick book, comparing to sitting comfortably and having good support. The mere fact of sitting in front of a monitor screen makes reading hard work and affects the students endurance. 4. Reading models 4.1 The bottom-up model The way one teaches reading always reflects the way one understands reading and the reading process. Some teachers teach reading by introducing new vocabulary and new structures first and then going over the text sentence by sentence. This is followed by some questions and answers and reading aloud practices. This way of teaching reflects the belief that reading comprehension is based on the understanding and mastery of all the new words, new phases, and new structures as well as a lot of reading aloud practices. Also, this reading follows a linear process from the recognition of letters, to words, to phrases, to sentences, to paragraphs, and then to the meaning of the whole text. This way of teaching reading is said to follow a bottom-up model. 4.2 The interactive model With the development of mental cognition of reading more and more experts tend to make a combination of the top-down method and down-top method. Therefore, a new mode called “interactive” was born. This kind of method believed that reading was actually an interactive process which contained various language knowledge, such as words, vocabulary, sentences pattern and meaning. For the information delivered by sight, readers initiative and knowledge and existed experiences.4.3 The top-down modelThe top-down model believes that ones background knowledge plays a more important role than new words and new structures in reading comprehension. For example, we all have experiences of reading something which does not contain any new words or new structures, but we still find it difficult to understand its meaning. In other cases, we may read an article with some new words or new structures in it, but we can guess the meaning of the article based on our knowledge about the topic without too much difficulty. Therefore, it is believed that in teaching reading, the teacher should teach the cultural background knowledge first so that students equipped with such knowledge will be able to guess meaning from the printed page. This process of reading is said to follow the top-down model of teaching reading just as Goodman (1970) once said that reading was a psycholinguistic guessing game.5. ExperimentThe experiment was conducted to examine the impacts of cultural background knowledge in their reading ability according to the top-down reading method. A study group and a control group separately attended classes with different lesson plans. 5.1 ParticipantsThirty participants were sampled from the same English proficiency level in the foreign department of Jiaying University and the students were divided into two groups. 5.2 Designs and materialsTwo different lesson plans were designed (see Appendix I). The controlled factors were the students level, the instructor, the reading text, the reading time, the testing time and the questions of the test. The study factor was the pre-reading activity in the study group. Both lesson plans comprised the same instructor, reading text, reading time, testing time and the test. However, they had different pre-readings. Lesson plan A included cultural warm-up activities but no pre-reading activities in lesson plan B. This text is “The Worst Kind of Abuse” written by Sylvia F. (see Appendix II). For the test, eight questions were designed for figuring out students comprehension (see Appendix III). In order to reduce students anxiety, this examination paper was laid out to seem like a questionnaire format but they were actually true-false questions. There were three choices of “Agree, Disagree, and I am not sure” for the students to respond to each question. The choice of “Im not sure” was designed to avoid students guessing if they were not sure of the answer. 5.3 Procedures I separately taught the students in the study group with lesson plan A and taught the students in the control group with lesson plan B. The difference of these two lessons was the pre-reading activities. In lesson plan A, the teacher and the students performed cultural background pre-reading activities in the study group. The students in this group were activated their background knowledge by a fifteen-minute warm-up discussion about the issues of religions, faith, marriage and family relationship. The discussion included cultural hints given by the instructor and small-group opinions sharing; the students in the study group were divided into five in one small group. Next on the reading stage, the students individually and silently read the story of “The Worst Kind of Abuse” in ten minutes. Then they have the reading test after the reading and their comprehension was evaluated by the reading test. In lesson plan B, however, the cultural background information was not given to the control group. The students in this group, in ten minutes, directly read the story without pre-reading discussion about the issues. Then, they were examined for their comprehension with the same reading test as which the study group was evaluated. Finally, according to the grading, correct answers to each student were added up and recorded for further analysis. 5.4 Results Table 1 Results of the tests on the study Group (Lesson A) and the Control Group (Lesson B) 15 students1 23456789101112131415Total scoreAverage scorescores in the study group8 788878888887881177.8Scores in the control group566645556676565835.5Each group has 15 English major students. And the grade was one score getting from one correct answer for each question. The total score was eight. The results of this experiment are concisely presented in Table one. The study group obtained 7.8 scores on average while the control group acquired 5.5. The former group received cultural background information before reading a cross-cultural text, while the latter group read without culturally prior knowledge warm-up. Table one reveals significantly different results of the tests after the teacher performed two lesson plans (A and B) in the two groups. In the study group, the students received cultural background knowledge through the warm-up activities and therefore got better comprehension. However, in the control group, the students read the s