TheRelationshipbetweentheReadingAbilityofEnglishMajorStudentsandCulturalBackground

毕业论文（设计）the level of students'recall from their cultural background knowledge and from thecontextual clues about cultural origins as well as college students and high middlestudents.(Carrell,1984;Carrell,1987;Floyd and Carrell,1987).This thesis concludesthe study of the relationship between the reading ability of English major students andcultural background and emphasizes the importance of cultural backgroundknowledge in English reading teaching.Meanwhile,using cultural backgroundknowledge instructs the students in English reading teaching,which can increase theteaching quality and reading efficiency of English major students and non-Englishmajor students in English reading teaching.Students may experience difficulty or lose their interests while reading somecross-cultural materials if their background knowledge has not been introduced.Withwarm-up cultural hints of a story,a quick figure and readers'expectations to the storymay elicit their interests and enhance their reading comprehension.Moreover,anumber of studies gave evidence that giving students'cross-cultural literature canraise students'general cultural background knowledge and reading competence.Gajdusek(1988)explored the idea that adding literature in the language program toimprove reading proficiency could be more helpful than just using academic texts.Azabdaftary (1992)found that English novels and short stories provided Englishmajor students subconscious acquisition to close the big gap between linguistictheories and language reading teaching.In addition,literature in English can easily beused to cultivate reading ability.Brock(1990)found three components of successfulreading comprehension through literature readings:students'background knowledge,2