The Effects of Cultural Familiarity and Reading Activities on L2 Reading Comprehension

AbstractThis study examines whether cultural familiarity has an influence on reading comprehension and whether using a set of reading activities compensate for the absence of cultural familiarity. 60 junior Turkish EFL university students participated to the study. A 2×2 true-experimental research design was used in the study. The results revealed that the nativized version of a short story from the target language culture contributes to comprehension of L2 readers’ significantly and the use of activities facilitated for better literal understanding of the original text. It also emphasizes a strong influence of cultural schema on comprehension