The Relationship between Awareness Raising Activities and Students’ proficiency in Reading Comprehension of Culturally- Bound Materials

Abstract

Comprehending a foreign language text, especially with unfamiliar words, is difficult. In order to understand a text, therefore, readers should have enough background knowledge. Cultural awareness is one of the important types of background knowledge. Reading and understanding a text isn’t just due to teaching syntactic structures or teaching new vocabularies and expressions, but mainly incorporates, some cultural elements, which are intertwined with language itself. The present study, therefore, is an attempt to determine the effect of awareness raising activities on the reading comprehension of culturally-bound materials. To this end, an experimental study was used. Participants were thirty students which were selected randomly and all were from English Language Teaching Department of Daneshvaran University in Tabriz. They were divided into two groups, one control group (n=15) and experimental group (n=15). Before treatment, in order to assess their knowledge of reading comprehension, a proficiency test was given to both groups. During the treatment, the experimental group received cultural awareness before reading, but control group didn’t receive any awareness. T-test also was used to measure the effect of awareness raising activities on the student’s reading comprehension. The results of the post-tests of two groups indicated that awareness raising activities facilitate reading comprehension of culturally-bound materials. In fact, the experimental group achieved considerable success in reading comprehension than control group. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n3p515