Abstract:
This study attempted to investigate the effects of cultural background knowledge on vocabulary learning through reading culturally oriented texts. The study was conducted with 150 upper-intermediate male (n = 75) and female (n = 75) EFL students. The participants of each gender were randomly assigned into three equal groups: group A (Target Culture = TC), group B (Source Culture = SC) and group C (Culture-Free = CF). After homogenizing the participants through a researcher-made vocabulary pretest, three groups received the treatment which was reading comprehension materials that reflected a particular culture. During the treatment, some reading passages related to American and English cultures, Persian culture, and culture free materials were taught to group A, group B, and group C, respectively. At the end of the study, a researcher-made vocabulary posttest was administered. Results of one-way ANCOVA and paired samples t test revealed significant effects of cultural familiarity whereby vocabulary gains were greater after participants read within the culturally oriented text. Moreover, the results showed that there was no significant difference in vocabulary knowledge posttest between male and female learners. Finally, implications arising from the findings were explained.
Machine summary:
Department of English, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran Abstract This study attempted to investigate the effects of cultural background knowledge on vocabulary learning through reading culturally oriented texts.
g. , Byram & Feng, 2012; Gabora, 2010; Hall, 2013; Hismanoglu, 2011; Valencia & Ximena, 2015).
Thus, the present study intended to investigate the impact of teaching cultural materials on developing the learners’ vocabulary knowledge through reading among upper- intermediate EFL Learners.
The positive impact of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension and vocabulary learning has been reported by numerous researches (Alptekin, 2006; Ebrahimi, 2012; Gürkan, 2012; Pulido, 2009; Rashidi & Soureshjani, 2011; Riazi & Babaei, 2011; Ryan, 2012).
com) offering different levels of English texts for learners along with a number of questions following each of them to check the users’ comprehension and other authentic sources such as ACTIVE Skills for Reading series (Anderson 2008), published by Heinle ELT, Top Notch, level 1 A by Saslow and Ascher (2007), and Select Reading Series (Lee & Gundersen, 2014).
As the first research question of the study was intended to figure out whether teaching cultural materials bring about any improvement in EFL learners’ understanding of English vocabulary, the pretest and posttest scores of the learners in the three groups were compared using a paired-samples t test: Table 1.
In brief, it demonstrates that this condition is compatible with the schema theory studies by (Bernhardt, 2009; Cristina & Martinez, 2014; Demir, 2012; Gürkan, 2012; Jafari & Aghaei, 2013; Pulido, 2009; Salmani- Nodoushan, 2006) proposing that receptive abilities such as reading need a scheme to improve the comprehension of a given text by the learners.