Cultural Orientation and Reading Comprehension Models: The Case of Iranian Rural and Urban Students
Bu çalışma, İngilizce’yi yabancı dil olarak öğrenen İran asıllı öğrencilerin yukarıdan aşağı ve aşağıdan yukarı okuma modelleri kullanımında şehir ya da kırsal kesim kökenli olmanın etkisini araştırmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu amaçla, araştırmacı biri şehirde biri de kırsalda olmak üzere İngilizce’yi yabancı dil olarak öğrenen iki grup seçmiştir. Katılımcıların sosyokültürel konumunu belirlemek için her iki gruba da bir demografik bilgiyi toplayan anket uygulanmıştır. Daha sonra, katılımcı gruba Nelson dil yeterlilik testi uygulanarak grup içi homojenlik sağlanmaya çalışılmıştır. Nelson testi, standardize edilmiş bir testtir. Daha sonra, metni yukarıdan aşağıya ve aşağıdan yukarıya çözümlemeye dair maddelere sahip önceden belirlenmiş on adet okuma parçası her iki gruba da uygulanmıştır. Deney on aşamada. Sonuçlar göstermektedir ki, şehirdeki öğrenciler, metin anlamada aşağıdan yukarıya akışına ek olarak, yukarıdan aşağıya stratejileri de kullanmışlardır. Bu stratejilerden bazıları, metinden anlam çıkarma, ana fikri bulma, metinden kelime tahmininde bulunma, geçmiş deneyimlerle bağlantı kurma ve yazarın anafikrine odaklanmadır. Oysa ki, kırsaldaki katılımcılar metne ve aşağıdan yukarıya çözümlemeye yüksek ölçüde bağlı kalmışlardır. Örneğin, metnin ana içeriğine çok fazla bağlı kaldıkları ve okuma parçasına ait soruları cevaplarken mevcut bilgi ve genel kültürleriyle hiç bağdaşım kurmadıkları görülmüştür.
The present study attempted to investigate the effect of rural and urban orientations on top-down and bottom-up reading models of the Iranian EFL students. To do this, the researcher selected two groups of EFL learners, one rural and the other, urban. To determine the socio-cultural status of the subjects, a demographic questionnaire was given to both groups. Then, the subjects were made homogeneous by administering a language proficiency test, Nelson. It is noteworthy that Nelson test had already been standardized. After that previously validated ten reading passages including top-down and bottom-up items were administered to both groups. The experiment lasted for ten sessions and the statistical analyses used in this study comprised a t-test to determine the homogeneity of the groups, a two-way ANOVA and Scheffe test. The results showed that in addition to bottom-up model, the urban students made use of top-down strategy including inferences, skimming for the main ideas, guessing the meaning of words from context, activating background knowledge, and focusing on the author's message, whereas rural subjects showed great reliance on texts and the application of bottom-up processing i.e. they heavily relied on the main content of the text, they never incorporated the knowledge of the world as well as their prior knowledge to answer reading comprehension questions.
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- ISSN: 1307-4733
- Yayın Aralığı: Yıllık
- Başlangıç: 2007
- Yayıncı: -
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