How Students' Mental Models Of Their Culture Affect Their Reading Comprehension

This research studies whether cultural schema has an influence on reading comprehension and whether using a set of reading activities make up for the lack of cultural familiarity. 80 Turkish/Persian languge students of pre-university participated in the cross-cultural study. Post-Hoc Scheffe and one-way ANOVA test were used in the study. We found that the Turkish language groups recalled the material dealing with their own cultural background better and more overall than their counterparts, i.e the cultural-specific schema embodied in the English version of the Turkish short story Aal by Mohammad Bahman Beigi contributed to the Turkish language participants to have significantly better understanding of the text, while both groups were reading in their foreign language, and the use of activities facilitated for better literal understanding of the text. This way, it emphasizes a strong impact of cultural familiarity on comprehension

Keywords:

schema theory , culture , reading comprehension