The effects of native culture-based folk stories on reading comprehension of Turkish high school students

Abstract

The role of background knowledge in reading comprehension has been formalized as “schema theory,” that is, any text is meaningful in so far as the background knowledge of the reader matches the information that the text brings. Research has demonstrated that the background knowledge that the reader brings to the comprehension process is often culture specific. Consequently, much of the empirical research focused on providing learners with the knowledge of the target culture based on the view that a language is learned in its own sociocultural milieu. Also, it has been demonstrated that the students’ comprehension is higher when reading texts about native culture. This quasi-experimental study intended to investigate whether native culturebased texts contribute to reading comprehension skills of Turkish high school students. Consequently, a two-week experimental-control group treatment of English renderings of Nasreddin Hoca stories and of target culture based texts was conducted.The hypothesis was that students who were exposed to native culture-based texts would improve significantly in comprehension as opposed to the students who were taught target culture-based texts. Seventy-one intermediate level high school students participated in the study; thirty-five in the experimental group and thirty-six in the control group. Both groups were tested prior to, and after the treatment. The pretest and the posttest contained the three passages with the same number of objective multiple choice questions (22). A Likert-type scale questionnaire which investigated their interest towards the use of native folk stories in teaching reading was administered to the students in the experimental group. The statistical analysis was carried out by the application of two t-tests: a ttest for independent samples, and another t-test for paired samples. Results indicated that the difference between the means of the pretest and the posttest of the experimental group was statistically significant at the traditional probability level .05, which meant that the treatment of native folk stories contributed to the reading comprehension skills. Hence, it can be argued that native culture-based materials could be utilized to improve Turkish learners’ reading comprehension skills in the teaching of English as a foreign language.