英语论文网

p;
（A little girl at her first church wedding suddenly whispered loudly to her mother）
“Mummy, has the lady changed her mind?”
“Why, dear, whatever do you mean?” her mother asked.
“Well, Mummy. She went up to the aisle with one man and came back with another.”
 
The last sentence “She went up to the aisle with one man and came back with another” is the key point to understand the meaning. This sentence has a culture entailment about wedding. That is the bride was given away by her father. If the readers do not know the custom, she may be thinking the bride changed her husband suddenly.
Another example, an article mentioned about in Britain, each job needs more people than necessary and the workers do not work hard. Then there is a question: “how do you understand ‘Tea breaks do matter.” Most of the readers considered “They can be used by the workers as an excuse to take time off from work.” They do not know teatime is very important to their daily life in Britain. And the right answer is “They are an important aspect of the British way of life.”
Therefore, learning the cultural background knowledge is very important to EFL readers.
2.4 Religious Factors
Religious culture is an important component in the life of human beings. It refers to the culture that is formed by religious belief of nations and can be embodied in the cultural differences of taboo in different nations. Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism are three main religions in China, which deeply influence Chinese people. On the contrary, many people living in English-speaking countries believe in Christianity, or have been seriously influenced by Christian values. They believe that a single God created and organized the world. The holy book of Christianity is the Bible. According to the Bible, God creates man with clay. There is one sentence in “Why I Teach” (Li Yinhua, 1997) as follows, “Being a teacher is being present at the creation, when the clay begins to breathe.” If students don’t know Western religion at all, they will not understand “the clay” in this sentence. In fact, here “the clay” is compared to the students who are aided to grow up from ignorant ones with the help of god like teachers. From this example, we know that Chinese students may not understand or misunderstand English reading at times due to a lack of the corresponding religious culture and differences in religious culture.
It is necessary to emphasize cultural differences as being potentially extensive and complex. In the process of English reading, at times we should focus on the understanding of cultural background to get a full understanding of the whole text. To make students further realize the importance of cultural knowledge in reading comprehension, the following section will illustrate the effects of cultural differences on EFL reading comprehension in detail.
 
Ⅲ. Language and Culture in Reading Comprehension
American linguist Edward Sapir said “culture can be interpreted as what the society did and thought; language is the formation of ideological.” (Hu Wenzhong, 1989). According to some scholars, culture can be divided into two parts: One is uppercase C culture, including literature, art, philosophy, history, geography, Education, architecture and scientific technology. The other is lowercase c culture, including custom, living habits, code of conduct, religious belief and mass 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。