The Culture of the Reader, the Origin of the Text, and How Children Predict as They Read
The impact of culture on reading comprehension is recognized by practitioners in the field of teaching English as a Second Language. Culture is an important part of what the reader brings to the page in terms of previous experiences which are stored and structured as knowledge. Cross-cultural studies, particularly of children, are few, and generally focus on the subject's recall of text. This is a study in which four groups of children, Americans in the United States, Americans who lived in India, Indians in India, and Indians living in the United States, read stories from both cultures. Each subject read one story about a birthday celebration and one about a wedding, one from India and one from the United States, making predictions at given points in the story about the word or phrase which might be expected to follow. At the end of the reading, the subject responded to oral questions which probed for interpretations.
Education, Bilingual and Multicultural, Education, Reading
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign