The Effects of The Language Complexity and The Culturally Determined Background of The Text on The Reading Comprehension of Iranian Students in Esl

Previous research has indicated that the linguistic structure and culturally determined background of prose may influence the readers' comprehension of a text written in a foreign language and set in a foreign culture. The present study sought to investigate the extent of these effects of language complexity and cultural origin of a story on the reading comprehension of foreign language learners. Subjects were 46 Iranian intermediate/advanced ESL students at the university level. Reading comprehension was tested by asking subjects to recall reading passages and to answer multiple choice questions on explicit and implicit information in the text. The reading passages were two stories, one from Iranian folklore and one from American folklore. One text of each story was written in unadapted English and the other text was adapted. The stories and the recall questions were also given to 19 American subjects whose performance was compared with that of the Iranian subjects.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Johnson, Patricia Ann

• Education, Language and Literature

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(UMI)AAI8026532

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/65959