Activating cultural knowledge to support EFL reading comprehension = Activating cultural knowledge to support EFL reading comprehension

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article reports the results of an experiment that tested the effects of cultural familiarity on the reading comprehension of native Korean-speaking students of English as a foreign language. The participants were 94 intermediate-proficiency students from elementary school to college, who were randomly assigned to two groups. The experimental materials were two versions (one original, one adjusted) of four English reading passages in three different genres: diary, report, and short stories. The original texts were adjusted by being nativized, which was done by changing elements of the text to increase the degree to which the content would be culturally familiar to the participants. Each group was given four readings (two original texts, two adjusted texts). Group A read the original version and Group B read the adjusted version of two of the readings for the other two readings, Group A read the adjusted version and Group B read the original version. The study’s results show that cultural familiarity has a direct influence on reading comprehension and that EFL learners can benefit from materials that activate their cultural knowledge.