The Effect of Cross-cultural Background Knowledge Instruction on Iranian EFL Learners' Reading Comprehension Ability

Abstract

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.