The influence of cultural content on reading comprehension among intermediate level high school students

T.C.

SELÇUK ÜNİVERSİTESİ SOSYAL BİLİMLER ENSTİTÜSÜ

YABANCI DİLLER EĞİTİMİ ANA BİLİM DALI

İNGİLİZCE ÖĞRETMENLİĞİ BİLİM DALI

THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURAL CONTENT ON READING

COMPREHENSION AMONG INTERMEDIATE LEVEL HIGH

SCHOOL STUDENTS

Yüksek Lisans Tezi

Danışman

Yrd. Doç. Dr. Hasan ÇAKIR

Hazırlayan Gülizar SAMUR

TABLE OF CONTENT

1.0. General Background to the study……….4

1.1. Aim of the study………...7

1.2. Scope of the study………7

1.2.1. Problem Statement……….7

1.2.2. Research Questions & Hypotheses………8

1.3. Limitations………9

CHAPTER II………...10

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE………...10

2.0. The Definition of Reading………..10

2.1. Types of Reading………12

2.1.1. Bottom-up Approach………...13

2.1.2. Top-down Approach………15

2.1.3. Interactive Models………...17

2.2. Learning to Read………20

2.3. The Importance of Reading Comprehension………..23

2.4.1. The Language Experience Approach (LEA)………...30

2.4.2. Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA)………31

2.4.3. Experience-Text-Relationship Method (ETR)………32

2.4.4. PreReading Plan (PreP)………...32

2.4.5. Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review Method (SQ3R)………33

2.5. Schema theory………35

2.5.1. Types of Schema……….36

2.5.2. Short Term Memory………45

2.5.3. Background Knowledge& Schema and Reading Comprehension……..47

2.6. Teaching Culture………48

2.6.1. Adopting Reading Texts………..55

2.6.2. Authentic Texts………...55 2.6.3. Learner’s Contribution………56 CHAPTER III……….57 METHODOLOGY……….57 3.0. Subjects……….……….……57 3.1. Setting……….………57 3.2. Materials……….58

3.3. Data Collection Procedure………..59

3.4. Data Analysis Procedure………59

3.5. Statistical Analysis……….60

CHAPTER IV………..71

CONCLUSION………71

4.0 Summary and discussion of the findings……….71

4.1 Implications of the results………...72

4.2 Suggestions for the further studies………..74

APPENDICES……….75

APPENDIX A: THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TEXTS………..75

APPENDIX B: THE WORLD’S LARGEST FAMILY………..76

APPENDIX C: THE LARGEST FAMILY IN TURKEY………..79

APPENDIX D: QUESTIONS-THE WORLD’S LARGEST FAMILY………..82

APPENDIX E: QUESTIONS-THE LARGEST FAMILY IN TURKEY………...85

ÖZET

Bu araştırmanın amacı; ilgili görüş ve düşünceler sunularak intermediate seviyedeki lise öğrencileri arasında okuduğunu anlama üzerinde, kültürel içeriğin ve sahip olunan ön bilgilerin etkisini incelemektir ve ‘Yabancı dildeki bir okuma parçasının içerdiği kültürüne özgü ve geçmiş bilgilere dayanan ögeler, dili öğrenenlerin ilgi ve anlama düzeylerini etkiler mi?; Öğrencilerin sahip oldukları ön bilgiler öğrencilerin yabancı dilde okuduklarını anlamalarını ne derece kolaylaştırır?; Öğrencilerin kültürel birikimlerine bağlı olarak, yabancı dildeki yeterliliğin okuduğunu anlamadaki rolü nedir?’ gibi soruların yanıtlarını bulmak olacaktır.

Birinci bölüm; çalışmanın amacını, problemin içeriğini ve ifadesini, hipotezlerini ve sınırlarını içerir.

İkinci bölüm; konuyla ilgili daha önce yapılmış çalışmalarda zaman içinde değişen ve gelişen görüşleri içerir. Okuma, okuduğunu anlama ve bunun üzerinde kültürel içeriğin etkisiyle ilgili çalışmaları inceler.

Üçüncü bölüm; yapılan araştırmayı, yöntem, sonuçlar, analiz ve tartışmalarıyla birlikte ortaya koyar.

Dördüncü ve son bölümde, araştırmada ortaya çıkan sonuçlar değerlendirilir. Elde edilen sonuçların İngilizce öğrenen öğrencilerin okuma ve okuduğunu anlama stratejileri konusunda eğitilmesinde faydalı olabilecek yorumlarla sona erer. Bu bölüm sonunda ekler ve kaynakça bölümü de bulunmaktadır.

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study is to examine the influence of cultural content and background information on reading comprehension among intermediate level high school students through the review of related literature, and to find the answer of some questions such as ‘Do the elements related to the culture and background in a reading text effect the level of comprehending and understanding of the foreign language learners?’ or ‘ To what extend does the schema of the students effect the reading comprehension?’ or ‘ According to foreign language learners’ cultural background, what is the role of foreign language proficiency in reading comprehension?’

Chapter one handles the aim and the scope of the study, the statement of the problem, the hypothesis and limitations.

Chapter two deals with the studies and the reviews about this subject, and focuses on the review of the literature related with the reading, reading comprehension and the effects of cultural content on reading comprehension.

Chapter three consists of the data collection and data analysis procedure of the study.

In the last chapter, the results are evaluated. This study ends with the implications for the foreign language learners and their reading comprehension strategies. Appendices and bibliography are also attached to the end of this chapter.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my great dept of gratitude to my thesis supervisor Assist. Prof. Dr. Hasan ÇAKIR for his expert advice, feedback and encouragement while writing this thesis. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Assist. Prof. Dr. A. Hamit CAKIR, Assist. Prof. Dr. A. Kadir CAKIR, Assist. Prof. Dr. Ece SARIGUL, Assist. Prof. Dr. A. Ali ARSLAN for their comments.

I am also grateful to Research Assisstant Vural CAGLIYAN, Department Of Management, for his aid with the statistical analysis of this study.

Special thanks goes to my best friend Feyza Nur BÜKEL, for her great company and support, for sharing the sleepless nights with me from the very beginning of our student life at this University to the end of this thesis study.

I would also like to thank my students in Ata İçil High School who voluntarily participated in my study.

Lastly many thanks to my family for supporting me and being quite patient before and during the study.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.0. General Background to the Study

Reading comprehension in foreign language learning has been a topic of much discussion for many years. Many educators seem to ask the same question that why do the students have difficulties in understanding a text. What can be the reason or reasons for this failure? What exactly are the attributes of a good reader in second language? If there is a relationship between culture and understanding and comprehending a reading text, to what extend can we analyze this effect?

The study of reading is both theorytically interesting and practically important. Reading is a domain in which experimental psychologists study fundamental questions such as how knowledge and experience affect perception. Reading is also a domain in which research findings have implications for important social issues, such as the education of children. It is no wonder, then, that a large amount of research has been carried out on reading.

To begin with, we can define reading as the interaction any reader has with a text. But in each reading case our reasons are varied and complex. Reading is sometimes considered as a passive skill. But we will see that reading is anything but passive. Reading involves the process of written language, and teaching reading than any other skill is spent more time in

According to Rivers and Temperly (1978:187) there are seven main purposes for reading:

1. to obtain information for some purpose or because we are curious about some topic;

2. to obtain instructions on how to perform some task for our work or daily life; 3. to act in a play, play a game, do a puzzle;

4. to keep in touch with friends by correspondence or to understand business letters; 5. to know when or where something will take place or what is available;

6. to know what is happening or has happened; 7. for enjoyment or excitement.

Davies (1995) set out different types of reading that exist:

1. receptive reading, which is rapid, automatic reading that we do when we read narratives;

2. reflective reading, in which we pause often and reflect on what we have read; 3. skim reading, in which we read rapidly to establish in a general way what a text is

about;

4. scanning, or searching for specific information.

Although there are various kinds of definitions of reading as the most important academic skill, Richards and Renandya (2002:273) state the special focus that reading has in foregin language teaching: “There are two important reasons for reading. First, language learners often have reading as one of their most important goals. Second written texts help reading to receive this special focus.” It is obvious that it is difficult to define reading just in a few single sentences. For instance; Grabe and Stoller (2002:9) define readins as “... the ability to draw meaning from the printed page and interpret this information appropriately.”

Nunan (1999: 250) questions the different purposes and strategies that he uses in an ordinary day. He lists the reading activities he does in a routine day and according to this list he claims that we read different things for different aims.

Reading is thinking and you need a specific purpose and positive behaviour when you read something, and it is clear that reading is one of the widely used activity in language classes. Therefore, we can handle reading in different point of views. Comprehension is one of these aspects that we are going to examine in this study. One important part of comprehension in reading for second language teachers is that the effect of background knowledge, particularly the cultural knowledge.

Pearson and Johnson (1978) contend that;

“Comprehension is building bridges between the new and the known. Comprehension is active not passive. Comprehension is simply a matter of recording and reporting verbatim what has been read. Comprehension involves a great deal of inference making. (p.24)”

When we consider reading comprehension as described above, an other important question emerges: To what extend the culture, background knowledge or schemata affects the process of comprehending a reading text? We think that readers comprehend a text easier when they are able to establish not only logical, but also cultural connections among the ideas in the text.

1.1. Aim of the Study

The aim of this study is to examine the influence of cultural content and the background knowledge on reading comprehension among intermediate level high school students. The aim of studying with intermediate level high school students is that they have already had a potential knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. In this study students are going to be divided into two different groups. The first group is going to be given the original story and the second group is going to be given the adopted reading text. After reading the texts the participants will answer the questions about the texts and their answers are going to be evaluated by taking this study into consideration. And we will try to reach the conclusion that cultural schema appears to have an important effect on the comprehension of the reading texts.

1.2. Scope of the Study

1.2.1. Problem Statement

Reading is an important component of learning a foreign language. Reading is a meaning making process and it involves the interaction between the reader and the written text. There are several factors that affect the reading comprehension of people in foreign language. Readers acquire meaning from a text in different ways such as analyzing the words and sentences against their background knowledge of the world and they use various activities which are called as reading strategies. A successful reader is a learner who can efficiently use these various strategies in different ways. However not using different strategies while reading for different purposes will make the readers fail. There are not many researchs done

that show the relationship between culturally determined background of a text and reading comprehension.

Sharing the idea that foreign language learners will comprehend a text belongs to their culture better then the texts belong to the target culture, this study aims to discover the effects of cultural content on reading comprehension of short texts. The research questions and hypotheses are as follows.

1.2.2. Research Questions & Hypotheses

As mentioned above, taking the background knowledge and schema theory into consideration the research questions and the hypotheses will be as follows:

RQ1- Does cultural familiarity of the foreign language learners affect reading comprehension?

RQ2- Can a foreign language learner answer the comprehension questions related with a culturally adopted written text better than a authentic written text?

H1- Cultural familiarity have an important influence on reading comprehension.

H2- Culturally adopted written texts make better than authentic texts in reading comprehension.

1.3. Limitations

In order to learn to read and comprehend a text a child needs a number of abilities and various types of knowledge. Vitally a reader should be able to understand the discourse. The ability to comprehend a text is a much more complex process than we consider. In this study a group of Turkish intermediate level high school students are taken into consideration. An experimental method is used to get results. Two different groups read the texts and answered the reading comprehension questions. This study does not include any knowledge about the students’ reading abilities in their mother tongue and the inference of these abilities.

This study had its limitations during the process. To begin with the problem, research questions and the hypothesis are presented. Secondly the relationship between the culture and reading comprehension is stated by reviewing the related literature. In the third part of the study an authentic text and an adopted text are given to the subjects with their comprehension questions. The subjects that are divided into two group answered the related questions and these answers are analyzed. Therefore in this part knowledge about experimental study is given. The limitation in this part is that the number of the subjects participate to the study is limited. Twenty four students participated to this experiment from the same school and at the same level. Also, the number and the kind of the questions about the texts are limited. There are three gruops of questions related to the texts. In the descriptive and comparative analysis of the data frequency and percent analysis were done. In the last chapter the answer to the research questions and the conclusions are presented.

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

2.0. The Definition of Reading

“Smith has taught himself to read Russian letters, but he hasn’t had time to learn the language. Bronski was brought up speaking Russian, but he never learned to read. One day, Bronski gets a letter in Russian from a relative. He cannot read it. He shows it to Smith. Smith can not understand it. But all is well: Smith reads the words aloud; Bronski recognizes them, and interprets them. He is happy. But who is ‘reading’?” (David Crystal:1987:209)

Reading does not mean simply ‘reading aloud’. According to David Crystal “reading crucially involves appreciating the sense of what is written: we read for meaning. It is the link between graphology and semantics.”

There have been a number of definitions of reading, so it is not so easy to define it just in a few sentences. A very simple definition of reading is to understand what has been written. The vital point here is to understand.

Grabe and Stoller (2002:9) define reading as “...the ability to draw meaning from printed page and interpret this information appropriately.”

According to Coady, reading involves a three fold relationship between the author and the text, between the reader and the text, and between the text and the culture.(Coady, 1979)

Goodman defines reading as a psycolinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader interprets and constructs. McCormick (1995:69) adds sociocultural phenomenon to the definition of reading as: “Reading may be usefully described as a cognitive activity, reading, like every act of cognition, always occurs in social context.”

Penny Ur (1996:138) states that, reading means “reading & understanding”. A foreign language learner who says, “I can read the words but I don’t know what they mean” is not, therefore, reading. In this sense, he or she is merely decoding-translating written symbols into corresponding sounds.

Understanding a piece of discourse involves much more than just knowing the language. In order to make sense of any text we need to have ‘pre-existent knowledge of the world’. (Cook 1989:69)

Consequently we can infer that meaning and comprehending is actually created by the reader, it is an interactive process not only a passive decoding process. This interaction occurs between the text and the reader’s background knowledge.

2.1. Types of Reading

Teaching reading can refer different meanings. It can be perceived as the teaching of the initial reading skills in a second language to the students who can not read in that language or it can be perceived as enhancing the reading skills of a second language learner who can already read. The later is being reviewed in this study. The reading process has changed a lot during the time. In recent years the interactive models of reading have come to importance. Wallace states the improvement of reading models and evaluates the roles given to the readers in a study. According to Wallace, especially in 1980s and 1990s the role of the reader has changed.

Reading was concerned as a passive skill and “...typically described as extracting meaning form a text” (Wallace, 2001, p.22). Nowadays it has started to be perceived as interactive rather than being only active. Wallace defines the bottom-up model reader as passive, the top-down model reader as active and the interactive model reader as interactive. Models of reading can be classified into three major groups and processes. (Grabe and Stoller 2002). On the other hand Carrell indicates that the most widely accepted view of reading in both first and second language learning is that it is an ‘interactive’ process where-by ‘bottom-up’ operations involving the physical text on the page, such as letter and word recognition, interact with ‘top-down’ process such as prior knowledge of the text type or topic. (Carrell et al., 1988)

2.1.1. Bottom-up Approach

Cook describes the bottom-up processing as “interpreting the lowest-level units first, then proceeding to an interpretation of the rank above, and so on upwards.” (Cook, 1989,p.156)

In the case of reading, as with other cognitive processes, psychologists have distinguished between two kinds of processing. Bottom-up processes are those that take in stimuli from the outside world -- letters and words, for reading -- and deal with that information with little recourse to higher-level knowledge. Theories that stress bottom-up processing focus on how readers extract information from the printed page, claiming that readers deal with letters and words in a relatively complete and systematic fashion (Gough, 1972).

The "bottom up" approach stipulates that the meaning of any text must be "decoded" by the reader and that students are "reading" when they can "sound out" words on a page. It emphasizes the ability to de-code or put into sound what is seen in a text. It ignores helping emerging readers to recognize what they, as readers, bring to the information on the page.

According to Eskey (1973, p.3), the decoding model is inadequate because it underestimates the contribution of the reader who makes predictions and processes information. It fails to recognize that students utilize their expectations about the text, based on their knowledge of language and how it works.

In this type of processing the reader attends to individual words and structures in the text itself, using these to build up an interpretation of the whole. Traditional linguistic analysis has involved bottom-up procedures, but recently the importance of top-down processing has become recognized. (Keith Johnson&Helen Johnson,1998,p.34)

The argument for bottom-up reading is that it involves ‘accurately using the words and structures needed’ to make meaning out of the text. Bottom-up model implies that meaning is constructed starting from the smallest units and working up to a broader understanding. This model of reading is also called a ‘data-driven’ process because the reader is dependent on text-based processing, in which the meaning arises from the ‘incoming data’. In bottom-up reading, the comprehension goes from ‘word (to) sentence and (to) discourse’. That is to say, words are combined into meaningful sentences and those are formed as meaningful associations, and finally information is stored.

Goodman (1967) characterised the bottom-up model of the reading process as “the common sense notion” that “reading is a precise process involving exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, word, spelling patterns and larger language units.” This model assumes that a reader proceeds by moving his eyes from left to right (for languages using the Latin alphabet) across the page, first taking in letters, combining these letters to words, then combining the words from the phrases, clauses and sentences of the text. In ‘bottom-up’ or text-based models the reader is seen as analysing text in small pieces, and building meaning from these units.

The bottom-up model also includes identifying the grammatical category of a word and recognizing meaning through word families and word formation. Therefore, relevant strategies are related to sound-letter relationship, or sentence, syntax, and text details, etc. (Carrell, 1988). Considering the traits of the bottom-up model, Grabe (1991) comes to a conclusion about less proficient readers. He says that those readers often appear to be word-bound which means that students focus on the meaning of individual words in order to understand a reading text.

2.1.2. Top-down Approach

Cook describes the top-down processing as “interpreting discourse by hypothesizing about the most general units first, then moving downwards through the ranks below.” (Cook, 1989,p.158)

Unlike the method in bottom-up processing, we bring to a text background knowledge which we utilize in the interpretation of its meaning. (Keith Johnson&Helen Johnson, 1998, p.353) This reading model is very much affected by the concept of background knowledge. This model suggests that readers use their knowledge of the subject -background knowledge- in their interaction with the text.

Grabe and Stoller (2002) states that top-down models assume that reading is primarily directed by readers’ aims and expectations. This approach also emphasises the importance of schemata and the readers’ contribution to the text.

With top-down processes the uptake of information is guided by an individual’s prior knowledge and expectations. In most situations, bottom-up and top-down processes work together to ensure the accurate and rapid processing of information. However, theories about the cognitive processes involved in reading differ in the emphasis that they place on the two approaches. Theories that stress top-down processing hold that readers form hypotheses about which words they will encounter and take in only just enough visual information to test their hypotheses (Goodman 1967, Smith 1971). In the words of Goodman, reading is a “psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Treiman gives an example that may help to clarify the distinction between theories that stress bottom-up processing and those that stress top-down processing. Suppose that a reader has just read, “Daylight savings time ends tomorrow, and so people should remember to change their …” According to the top-down view, the reader guesses that the next word in the sentence will be “clocks.” The reader checks that the word begins with a “c” and, because the hypothesis has been supported, does not take in the remaining letters of the word. Theories of reading that stress bottom-up processing claim that the reader processes all of the letters in the last word of the sentence, regardless of its predictability. Studies of readers’ eye movements provide some insight into the roles of bottom-up and top-down processes in reading.

Research has shown that the eye does not sweep across a line of text in a continuous fashion. Rather, the eye comes to rest for somewhere around a quarter of a second, in what is called a fixation, and then makes a rapid jump (a saccade) to the next fixation. It is during the fixation that visual stimulation is taken in; little or no useful information is extracted during a saccade.

Researchers have found that skilled readers fixate at least once on the majority of words in a text. They do not skip a large number of words, as the top-down view predicts, but instead process the letters and words rather thoroughly. Readers do this, in part, because their span of useful vision is fairly small. For example, a reader who fixates on the “a” of “daylight” will be able to see all of the letters in this word. The reader may or may not be able to see enough to identify the next word, “savings,” but will be unable to identify “time.” Thus, the eye movement data portray reading as more of a bottom-up process than a top-down process. (Treiman, 2001, p. 664)

Eskey (1988) demonstrates the limitations of top-down approaches. According to him, this model requires the usage of context clues and combining them with background knowledge. However this is valid for only skilful and fluent readers, so the model does not work with less fluent readres.

For many texts, the reader has little knowledge of the topic and cannot generate predictions. Even if a skilled reader can generate predictions, this would take much longer than it would to recognize the words.

2.1.2. Interactive Models

The limitations of bottom-up and top-down approaches led the theorists criticise them and they developed a new approach: the interactive model. The difference between top-down and bottom-up models is examplified by Harmer (2001). The former is described as looking at a forest or looking down on something from above, while the latter is described as studying the individual trees in a forest or trying to understand where a person is by being in the middle of something.

For the reading theorists who recognized the importance of both the text and the reader in the reading process, an amalgamation of the two emerged the interactive approach. Reading here is the process of combining textual information with the information the reader brings to a text.

The interactive model (Rumelhart 1977; Stanovich 1980) stresses both what is on the written page and what a reader brings to it using both top-down and bottom-up skills. It views reading as the interaction between reader and text. The overreliance on either mode of processing to the neglect of the other mode has been found to cause reading difficulties for second language learners (Carrell 1988, p. 239) The interactive models of reading assume that skills at all levels are interactively available to process and interpret the text (Grabe 1988). In this model, good readers are both good decoders and good interpreters of text, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less important as their reading skill develops (Eskey 1988).

According to Rumelhart's interactive model; linear models which pass information only in one direction and which do not permit the information contained in a higher stage to influence the processing of a lower stage contain a serious deficiency. Hence the need for an interactive model which permits the information contained in a higher stage of processing to influence the analysis that occurs at a lower stage. When an error in word recognition is made, the word substitution will maintain the same part of speech as the word for which it was substituted, which will make it difficult for the reader to understand. (orthographic knowledge) Semantic knowledge influences word perception. (semantic knowledge) Perception of syntax for a given word depends upon the context in which the word is

embedded (syntactic knowledge). Our interpretation of what we read depends upon the context in which a text segment is embedded (lexical knowledge). All the mentioned knowledge sources provide input simultaneously. These sources need to communicate and interact with each other, and the higher-order stages should be able to influence the processing of lower-order stages.

According to Stanovich's interactive-compensatory model; Top-down processing may be easier for the poor reader who may be slow at word recognition but has knowledge of the text topic. Bottom-up processing may be easier for the reader who is skilled at word recognition but does not know much about the text topic. Stanovich's model states, then, that any stage may communicate with any other and any reader may rely on better developed knowledge sources when other sources are temporarily weak.

To properly achieve fluency and accuracy, developing readers must work at perfecting both their bottom-up recognition skills and their top-down interpretation strategies. Good reading (that is fluent and accurate reading) can result only from a constant interaction between these processes. Fluent reading entails both skillful decoding and relating information to prior knowledge (Eskey, 1988).

Therefore, an interactive reading model requires both the contribution of background information as well as linguistic knowledge of the language. Meaning is actually created by the reader. Thus, the created meaning involves the reader’s knowledge already stored in memory and information presented in the text. As a result reading is not a passive process that the reader only decodes.

ESL researchers should be interested in interactive models for several reasons: 1- several studies note that linguistic deficiencies are inhibiting factors in reading (Carrell, 1988).

2- there is a need for extensive vocabulary for reading

3- there is a need to account for poor readers who do guess extensively.

4- good readers are not good simply because they are better predictors, or make better use of context.

2.2. Learning to Read

Reading success is one of the most critical issues facing foreign language learning today. The goal of reading success is to facilitate the development of a variety of skills and dispositions among children that sets the context for them to read widely and deeply, communicate effectively in spoken and written form. Achievement of this goal, however, poses certain challenges to both teachers and students. Many foreign language teachers have identified a need to find effective approaches to modifying their curriculum and instruction in their classrooms to meet diverse student needs. As students make the transition from elementary to middle and secondary schools, particularly in the area of reading the demand for performing successfully in content increases.

Mostly content cousework requires a relatively large amount of reading, because textbooks and supplementary materials are the major sources of information. In expository materials, the vocabulary and structure of the text is often more difficult to understand than that found in narrative material, and the content is frequently beyond the reader's experience.

Students demonstrate ineffective and inefficient strategies on tasks in which the reading materials are on or above their reading level. Fluent reading has been characterized as ‘rapid, purposeful, interactive, comprehending, flexible and gradually developing’. A fluent reader has to retain the message in a written text, and to make the necessary deductions and connections. Reading develops gradually because the reader uses a range of models and strategies to read efficiently.

Goodman (1988) states that an effective reader constructs meaning from written language by using the knowledge of graphonic, syntactic, and semantic systems of language through ‘assimilation or accommodation, and coming to an agreement’ with what the writer intends to mean. Readers ought to use mental acitivities and those are referred to as ‘reading strategies’. Barnett describes reading strategies as ‘the mental operations involved when readers purposefully approach a text to make sense of what they read.’ (Barnett, 1989, p.66) Reading models mentioned above describe what a reader does in reading; whereas reading strategies describe how s/he does it.

Some general implications can be stated for the teaching of second language reading (Eskey & Grabe, p. 227). Some time must be devoted in the reading class to bottom-up concerns such as the rapid and accurate identification of lexical and grammatical forms. Even students who have developed strong top-down skills in their native languages may not be able to transfer these higher-level skills to a second language context until they have developed a stronger bottom-up foundation of basic identification skills. Some time must also be devoted in the reading class to top-down concerns such as; reading for global meaning (as opposed to mere decoding), developing a willingness to take chances, developing appropriate schemata for the proper interpretation of texts. Reading of any kind of text must be treated as real

reading, that is, reading for meaning. No student should ever be forced or encouraged to limit him/herself to decoding skills. And, before a foreign language learner begin to read s/he must know the purpose.

Good readers are active readers. From the outset they have clear goals in mind for their reading. They constantly evaluate whether the text, and their reading of it, is meeting their goals. Good readers typically look over the text before they read, noting such things as the structure of the text and text sections that might be most relevant to their reading goals. As they read, good readers frequently make predictions about what is to come. They read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading -- what to read carefully, what to read quickly, what not to read, what to re-read, and so on. Good readers construct, revise, and question the meanings they make as they read. They draw upon, compare, and integrate their prior knowledge with material in the text. They think about the authors of the text, their style, beliefs, intentions, historical milieu, and so on. They monitor their understanding of the text, making adjustments in their reading as necessary. Good readers try to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and concepts in the text, and deal with inconsistencies or gaps as needed. They evaluate the text’s quality and value, and react to the text in a range of ways, both intellectual and emotional. Good readers read different kinds of text differently. For example, when reading narrative, good readers attend closely to the setting and characters; when reading expository text these readers frequently construct and revise summaries of what they have read. For good readers, text processing occurs not only during ‘reading’ as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short breaks taken during reading, and even after the ‘reading’ itself has commenced. Comprehension is a consuming and complex activity, but one that, for good readers, is typically both satisfying and productive.

What a child needs to learn how to read may not be the same as what a literate person does while reading. Goodman (1967) views reading as a process whereby a hypothesis is constructed based on the clues already sampled. Expectations about what is to appear next depend on semantic and sequential labeling strategies the reader uses to weigh the plausibility of an interpretation. Decoding a text occurs because of manipulation of syntactic clues perceived by the reader. Not all clues an author intended are noticed nor would processing be the same. Of course, a reader does not have to possess the same attitude as an author to understand what is being said. Previous opinions interact with a text and influence the slant it is read with and processed. Reading a text is much like seeing a known place once again: Changes attract additional attention but eventually are included as known features. Reading is far from a passive activity.

In short, for second language readers, especially, both top-down and bottom-up skills and strategies must be developed conjointly since both contribute directly to the successful comprehension of text.

2.3. The Importance of Reading Comprehension

If we consider reading as any reader interaction with text, we can state that comprehension is one aspect of reading. Other aspects include decoding, scanning and vocalizing the print on the page.

In attempting to develop a definition of reading comprehension, the first issue to be addressed is whether reading comprehension should be viewed as a process or as a product. A

second issue relates to the nature of the process(es) involved in comprehension. Are there identifiable subsystems operating, or is there one complex indivisible process operating?

Reading comprehension, as defined by Grabe (1991), is "a combination of identification and interpretation skills". More than just reinforcement of oral communication, fluent reading is done when new information interacts with previous knowledge. As important as previous schemata are, unknown vocabulary can leave a reader at a loss of what to do. Schema theory is popular in second language reading research but first language researchers find the term less than ideal. It is held responsible for explaining reading ability but "cannot be explicitly defined" (Grabe Ibid. p. 384).

In much the same way as other second language acquisition research, schema theory is useful to draw comparisons between first language and second language development but is difficult to prove. Theory comprised of unfalsifyable hypothesizes is difficult to accept but useful in that it stimulates research (Larsen-Freeman & Long, 1991, p. 249). Second language researchers use schema theory as an explanation for methods of improving reading comprehension that work. Even though this does not prove the theory, it is still useful to be familiar with it.

Most current approaches embody an assumption that reading comprehension is a product of a reader’s interaction with a text. This product is stored in the reader’s memory and may be examined by convincing the reader to express relevant segments of the stored material. The pruduct position implies that long-term memory plays a large part in comprehension, determining how ‘successful’ the reader is at comprehending; this position is typified by standardized tests and free recall measures.

In contrast, Carroll (1971) contends that comprehension is a process which occurs immediately on reception of information and that only short-term memory is involved. His processes are represented by eye-movement and reaction-time studies, and miscue analysis. He states ‘As soon as longer time intervals are involved in the testing of comprehension, there is the possibility that we are studying memory prcesses along with, or in place of, comprehension processes’ (Carroll, 1971, p.6).

Royer and Cunningham (1978, p.36) take issue with both the process and product approaches and contend that ‘...comprehension processes and memory processes are inextricably intertwined...’ This indicates the blend of both product and process approaches. Reading comprehension has alternatively been considered as a holistic process (Thorndike, 1974) and as a process composed of distinct subprocesses.

Reading is a bi-directional process that concerns both the Reader & the Text. The level of reader comprehension of the text is determined by how well the reader variables (interest level in the text, purpose for reading the text, knowledge of the topic, foreign language abilities, awareness of the reading process, and level of willingness to take risks) interact with the text variables (text type, structure, syntax, and vocabulary).

Comprehension strategies indicate how readers conceive a task, what textual cues they attend to, how they make sense of what they read and what they do when they do not understand. Strategies, therefore reveal a reader’s resources for understandinf. Johnston

(1983) identifies two types of strategies one aids the reader in constructing a model of the meaning of text, a framework fo understanding; the other is used to monitor understanding and take action when necessary.

Many researchers have compared the performance of ‘good’ and ‘poor’ readers or older and younger readers. The results of recent studies suggest that good readers are more able to monitor their reading comprehension than poor readers are, that they are more aware of the strategies more flexibly. Specifically, good readres adjust their studies to the type of text they are reading and to the prupose for which they are read,ng. They distinguish between important information and details as they read are able to use clues in the text to anticipate information and/or relate new information with information already stated. They are able to notice inconsistencies in a text and employ strategies to make these inconsistencies understandable.

Macnamara (1970) argues that reading and comprehension ability in a second language is largely a function of proficiency in that language. Thus, language skills develop in a linear possession moving from lower-level letter and word-level skills to higher-level cognitive ones. The other group asserts that higher level strategies developed in a first language can be transferred to a second language and can operate alongside lower processing strategies.

These researchers believe that as language proficiency develops, linguistic cues can be used more efficiently and that predictions, comprehension and other cognitive processes will therefore operate more smoothly. Cognitive straegies, however, are applied throughout the process.

Reading comprehension, or in other words, understanding a written text doesn’t mean extracting all the information from the text, but it means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. While reading, it is essential that the following elements be taken into consideration. What do we read? Why do we read? How do we read?

One of the most important point to be made about the reading process is that reading comprehension isn’t essentially different from other kinds of comprehension. The mental tasks involved are not peculiar to reading but fundemantal human cognitive acts. Comprehension of any kind depends on knowledge.

As Frank Smith (1975) has observed, reading is simply one of the ways in which human beings go about their basic business of ‘making sense of the world’.

Eskey (1986) argues that no matter how well a student may know know a language, he can not read in that language with good comprehension if the subject of the text is one he knows absolutely nothing about and therefore can have no real interest in. Reading comprehension is most likely to occur when students are reading what they want to read, or at least what they see some good reason to read.

Rivers (1983) explains Frank Smith’s three radical insights with regard to reading and discusses the implications of these insights.

1) Only a small part of the information necessary for reding comprehension comes from the printed page.

2) Readers have expectations about content of what they are about to read and its development, which are further stimulated as they continue to read by what they have already understood.

3) The function of the symbols on the prited page is to reduce the uncertainty of the reader, as information (or meaning) is derived from the script. For this reason, an efficient reader needs only schematic indications of the actual visual forms.

According to Anderson, comprehending a text is an interactive process between the reader’s backgorund knowledge and the text. Efficient comprehending requires the ability to relate the textual material to one’s own knowledge. Comprehending words sentences, and entire text, involves more than just relying on one’s liguistic knowledge. As Anderson points out, ‘every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world as well’ (Anderson et al. 1977:369).

It is an obvious fact that reading comprehension in one’s native language involves the role of knowledge of native text structure. Brewer (1980) points out that reading is a complex, interactive, hypothesis-generating psycholinguistic processes which is tried intimately to the reader’s language proficiency. While there are basic similarities in the fluent reading process in various languages, it is natural to expect that non-native language proficiency or language differences may influence reading, and learning to read, a second language.

Comprehension of any kind, such as in reading, listening depends on what knowledge we get. Comprehension means relating what we know and do not, or new information, to

what we already know, which is not a random collection of facts but a world view in each of our heads, called ‘cognitive structure’.

Rivers claims that only a small part of the information necessary for reading comprehension comes from the printed page. She points out that readers have expectations about the content of what they are about to read and how it develops, which further stimulates readers as they continue reading by what they already understood. The function of the symbols on the printed page is to reduce the doubts of the reader as meaning is derived from the writing. Therefore, an efficient reader needs only schematic prior knowledge indications of the actual visual forms (Rivers 1983).

Eskey argues that how well a student may know a language is related to how s/he can comprehed what she reads. She can not read in that language with good comprehension if the subject of the text is one she knows nothing or very little about, and therefore would have no real interest in it. Reading comprehension is most likely to occur when students are reading what they want to read, or at least what they see as some good reason to read (Eskey 1986).

The reading goal is to read for meaning or to recreate the writer’s meaning. Reading to improve pronunciation, practice grammatical forms and study vocabulary do not constitude reading at all because, by definition, reading involves comprehension. When readres are not comprehending, they are not reading. Comprehension of a text rlates to a reader’s experiences and knowledge of how to bear the words that have been decoded by the writer. Badrawi states thet ‘comprehension is a mental process. It is not getting meaning from the printed page, as there is no meaning there, but only lines and cirves that we call letters and from which we find words’.

2.4. Cultural Content and Reading Comprehension

The teaching of reading has gone through a process of evaluation ever since English started to be thought as a second language. Before reading has seen as an active skill, reading texts were produced for written reinforcement of oral instruction. They were intented to improve of reinforce grammatical patterns and vocabulary in the auidoligual classroom

In this part of the study it is going to be stated that what is cultural content and as teachers how can we improve the knowledge of content and how can the appropriate background knowledge be activated.

2.4.1. The Language Experience Approach (LEA)

"The Language Experience Approach (LEA) to teaching reading in English as a second language uses the student's own experiences, vocabulary, and language patterns to create texts for reading instruction and make reading a meaningful process." (Dixon & Nessel, 1983)

"Students dictate stories to the teacher or share orally a common experience. When written down by or in collaboration with the teacher, these experiences and stories become texts for initial reading instruction. The stories are accessible because they reflect the language and experience of the learners. This approach is excellent for creating reading texts for beginning-level ESL students whose command of vocabulary and structures in English is

limited, as well as for those who are learning to read for the first time. (See Dixon & Nessel, 1983; Rabideau, 1991; Taylor, 1992 for descriptions of the LEA.) D'Annunzio (1990) describes a bilingual version of the LEA." (Rabideau, 1993)

The LEA instructional procedures are designed to be applied according to levels of use rather than age or grade level.

2.4.2. Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA)

Developed by Stauffer, the DRTA is a group comprehension activity that features prediction of the story events prior to reading, reading to prove or modify predictions, and the use of divergent thinking.

Benefits:

· Students themselves set reading purposes by making predictions and reading to prove or refute them.

· They generally read more actively and enthusiastically because they are more interested in finding out what happened.

· They often remember more information, even after much time has passed. One reason for this accomplishment may be their increased curiosity.

2.4.3. Experience-Text-Relationship Method (ETR)

A teaching procedure of advance speculative organization on the teacher's part, who selects texts in relation to what he thinks may interest his group of learners.

The basic element of the ETR method is discussion of a text and topics related to the text, especially students' own experiences.

Teachers conduct discussion of stories in three phases:

First, they guide students to activate what they know that will help them understand what they read, make predictions, and set purposes. This is the Experience phase. Next, they read the story with the students, stopping at appropriate points to discuss the story, determine whether their predictions were confirmed, and so on. This is the Text phase. After they have finished the story, teachers guide students to relate ideas from a text to their own experiences. This is the Relationship phase. Teachers facilitate comprehension, model processes, and may coach students as they engage in reading and comprehension activities.

2.4.4. PreReading Plan (PreP)

Purpose: To diagnose students' prior knowledge and provide necessary background knowledge so they will be prepared to understand what they will be reading.

Rationale: A diagnostic and instructional procedure used when students read informational books and content area textbooks.

Procedure: Introduce key concept to students using a word, phrase, or picture to initiate a discussion. Have students brainstorm words about the topic, and record their ideas

and clarify any misconceptions. Have students draw pictures and/or write a quickwrite about topic using words from the brainstormed list. Have students share quickwrites and ask questions to help clarify and elaborate quickwrites.

Strengths: To help the students learn about a subject before starting a lesson. Weaknesses: Classroom management.

2.4.5. Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review Method (SQ3R)

Survey

Survey means to scan the main parts of the text you are going to read. This includes looking at the title, headings of paragraphs, introduction and conclusion, first lines of each paragraph, and any extra information that may be presented in boxes on the page. Doing this gives you some basic understanding of what the text is about and helps you know what to expect when you read in more detail.

Question

Questions are very helpful when you read a text. Most of the time, people read first, and then look at questions at the end of the text. However, this is not the best way to read. If possible, read the questions provided for you FIRST. This will help you know what specific information to look for. Questions (those that are provided with text and those provided by your teacher) are designed to focus on the main points. Therefore, if you read to answer these questions, you will be focusing on the main points in the text. This helps you read with a goal in mind - answering specific questions.

Read

Once you have some idea of what the text is about and what the main points might be, start reading. Do not be afraid if the text has many words you cannot understand. Just read!

Follow these suggestions:Do not use your dictionary the first time through the text. Try to understand as much as you can from the context. Take notes as you go. Make a note of places that you do not understand, or words that are unclear. Go through the text a second time. Try to answer the questions.

Recite

Studies have suggested that students remember 80% of what they learn, if they repeat the information verbally. If they do not repeat verbally, they often forget 80%. Writing down the answers to questions from the text and saying these answers will help you remember the information. One good way to do this is to discuss the information with a friend or classmate, or with the professor. Try to summarize the main points you have learned from the reading and add to your knowledge from the comments and responses of the person you are talking with.

Review

Review means to go over something again. In order to remember information, you cannot simply memorize it one day and then put it aside. After you have read and discussed and studied your information, it is important to review your notes again a few days or weeks later. This will help you keep the information fresh in your mind.

2.5. Schema theory

Schema theory deals with the reading process, where readers are expected to combine their previous experiences with the text they are reading. Since each reader has different background knowledge, it is culture specific. Schema theory was developed by the gestalt psychologist Bartlett “...who observed how people, when asked to repeat a story from memory, filled in details which did not occur in the original but conformed to their cultural norms” (Cook 1997: 86).

Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) formalise the role of background knowledge in language comprehension as schema theory, and claim that any text either spoken or written does not itself carry meaning. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983: 556) claim that “... a text only provides directions for… readers as to how they should retrieve or construct meaning from their own, previously acquired knowledge.”

The very important role of background knowledge on reading comprehension is noted by Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) and Anderson (1999), that a reader’s comprehension depends on her ability to relate the information that she gets from the text with her pre-existing background knowledge.

2.5.1. Types of Schema

Background knowledge – also prior knowledge – is supposed to consist of two main components: “our assimilated direct experiences of life and its manifold activities, and our assimilated verbal experiences and encounters” (Swales 1990: 83).

Before proceeding any further, the notion of schema must be defined. Schemas, or schema as they are sometimes known, have been described as "cognitive constructs which allow for the organization of information in long-term memory (Widdowson, 1983). Cook (1989) states, "the mind, stimulated by key words or phrases in the text or by the context, activates a knowledge schema" (Cook, 1989, p. 69). Widdowson & Cook both empahsize the cognitive characteristics of schema which allow us to related incoming information to already known information. This covers the knowledge of the world, from everyday knowledge to very specialized knowledge, knowledge of language structures, and knowledge of texts and forms they take in terms of genre, and organization. In addition to allowing us to organize information and knowledge economically, schemas also allow us to predict the continuation of both spoken and written discourse. The first part of a text activates a schema, that is, calls up a schema which is either confirmed or disconfirmed by what follows.

Research on the theory of schema has had a great impact on understanding reading. Researchers have identified several types of schemata. Content schema, which refers to a reader's background or world knowledge, provides readers with a foundation, a basis for comparison (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983; Carrell, Pharis, & Liberto, 1989). Formal schema, often known as textual schema, refers to the organizational forms and rhetorical structures of written texts. It can include knowledge of different text types and genres, and also includes

the understanding that different types of texts use text organization, language structures, vocabulary, grammar, level of formality/register differently. Schooling and culture play the largest role in providing one with a knowledge base of formal schemata.

While formal schemata cover discourse level items, linguistic or language schemata include the decoding features needed to recognize words and how they fit together in a sentence. First language readers, may through repeated examples, be able to generalize a pattern or guess the meaning of a word, which may not have initially been part of their linguistic schema. The building of linguistic schema in a second language can proceed in the much the same way.

From the above discussion it is evident that schema plays an important role in text comprehension, both in the L1 and L2 context. For example, whether reading in a first or second language, one can assume that both native and non-native readers will understand more of a text when they are familiar with content, formal, and linguistic schema. An L2 reader, however, who does not possess such knowledge can experience schema interference, or lack of comprehension- ideas which are examined further in the following discussion pertaining to relevant research in this area.

Content schema or cultural orientation in terms of background knowledge is also a factor that influences L2/FL reading and has been discussed by Barnett (1989), Carrell and Eisterhold (1983), and Johnson (1982). Most methodologies investigating the role of schemata or background/prior knowledge were variations on Carrell's (1987) paradigm. This study involved 28 Muslim Arabs and 24 Catholic Hispanic ESL students of high-intermediate proficiency enrolled in an intensive English program at a midwestern university. Each student

read two texts, one with Muslim-oriented content and the other with Catholic-oriented content. Each text was presented in either a well-organized rhetorical format or an unfamiliar, altered rhetorical format.

After reading each text, the subjects answered a series of multiple-choice comprehension questions and were asked to recall the text in writing. Analysis of the recall protocols and scores on the comprehension questions suggested that schemata affected the ESL readers' comprehension and recall. Participants better comprehended and remembered passages that were similar in some way to their native cultures, or that were deemed more familiar to them. Other studies have shown similar effects in that participants better comprehended and/or remembered passages that were more familiar to them (Carrell, 1981; Johnson, 1981, 1982).

Further evidence from such studies also suggested that readers' schemata for content affected comprehension and remembering more than did their formal schemata for text organization. For example in the Carrell's (1987) study described above, subjects remembered the most when both the content and rhetorical form was familiar to them. However, when only content or only form was unfamiliar, unfamiliar content caused more difficulty for the readers than did unfamiliar form.

Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984) conducted a study using two descriptions of weddings both written in English. One was a descritption of an American wedding, while the other was of and Indian (subcontinent) wedding. Both the Indian students, for whom English was an L2, and the American students, for whom English was the L1, read the descriptions and were asked to recall the descriptions. It was found that readers comprehended texts about their own

cultures more accurately than the other. While the readers indicated that the words were easy to understand, the unfamiliar cultural protocol of an Indian wedding made the passage more difficult to remember.

Johnson's (1981) study investigated the effects of the cultural origin of prose on the reading comprehension of 46 Iranian intermediate advanced ESL students at the university level. Half of the subjects read the unadapted English texts of two stories, one from Iranian folklore and one from American folklore, while the other half read the same stories in adapted English. The subjects' reading comprehension was tested through the use of multiple-choice questions. The recall questions and the texts were also given to 19 American subjects for comparison purposes. Results revealed that the cultural origin of the story had a greater effect on comprehension than syntactic or semantic complexity of the text. In another study, Johnson (1982) compared ESL students' recall on a reading passage on Halloween. Seventy-two ESL students at the university level read a passage on the topic of Halloween.

The passage contained both unfamiliar and familiar information based on the subjects' recent experience of the custom. Some subjects studied the meanings for unfamiliar words in the text. Results of recall protocols suggested that prior cultural experience prepared readers for comprehension of the familiar information about Halloween on the passage. However, exposure to the unfamiliar words did not seem to have a significant effect on their reading comprehension. An interesting study was carried out by Kang (1992). Kang's study examined how second language readers filter information from second language texts through culture specific background knowledge. Korean graduate students with advanced English read stories and answered questions. A think-aloud protocol assessing their understanding and inferences indicated an effect of culture specific schemata and inferences upon text comprehension.

Although all the variables and factors surrounding the issues of how culture shapes background knowledge and influences reading are not fully understood, there is agreement that background knowledge is important, and that content schema plays an integral role in reading comprehension. Overall, readers appeared to have a higher level of comprehension when the content was familiar to them. Given this, second language readers do not possess the same degree of content schema as first language readers, and hence, this can result in comprehension difficulties.

Many studies have also examined the role of text schemata in relation to readers' comprehension. Most of these studies employed similar methodologies in that participants read texts and then recalled information, for the most part in writing. The structures inherent in the texts (e.g., compare-contrast, problem-solving structures in expository text, and standard versus structurally interleaved versions of stories) were identified. Recalled information was analyzed for specific variables such as the number of propositions recalled, and temporal sequence of story components.

For the most part, these studies suggested that different types of text structure affected comprehension and recall (Bean, Potter, & Clark, 1980; Carrell, 1984). Some studies also showed that there may have differences among language groups as to which text structures facilitated recall better (Carrell, 1984). For example, Carrell's (1984) study showed that Arabs remembered best from expository texts with comparison structures, next best from problem-solution structures and collections of descriptions, and least well from causation structures. Asians, however, recalled best from texts with either problem-solution or causation structures, and least well from either comparison structures or collections of descriptions.

These results; however, must be taken as suggestive as further studies examining the interaction of language background with text structure are needed. Regardless of these findings, as previously stated, it is important to recognize that organizational structures in text will differ across cultures.

Stone's (1985) study examined whether language patterns found in English, which differed from those in Spanish, would have a significant effect on ESL learners' comprehension while reading English text. Average fifth grade readers were randomly assigned to either an initial Spanish-speaking group or an initial English speaking group. Nine stories were developed for the study, three for each of three different language patterns categories: similar, moderately similar, and dissimilar. Measures included a retelling and comprehension questions. Results showed that on the retelling measures, the lowest scores were found on stories that were most dissimilar from the students' initial language, and oral reading errors increased as language pattern similarity decreased. The results support the contention that texts violating readers' expectations about language patterns can have disruptive effects.

Over the last few years, the field of contrastive rhetoric has emerged initiated by the work of Kaplan (1966). Its areas of focus are the role of the first language conventions of discourse and rhetorical structure on L2 usage, as well as cognitive and cultural dimensions of transfer, particularly in relation to writing. For the most part, contrastive rhetoric identifies problems in composition encountered by L2 writers and by referring to rhetorical strategies of the first language, attempts to explain them. It is clear that such differences in text structure can lead to difficulties in reading.