ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 1, No. 11, pp. 1561-1570, November 2011 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.1.11.1561-1570 © 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER A Quantitative and a Qualitative Analysis of the Effect of Culture and Language on Arab Students‟ Response to Authentic Literature in English Rahma I. Al-Mahrooqi Sultan Qaboos University, Oman Email: ralmahrooqi@yahoo.com Abstract—Reading in a foreign language is laborious (Gorsuch & Taguchi, 2008), involving interaction between bottom-up and top-down movement in the process of creating meaning. When reading authentic literature, students must grapple not only with the text’s linguistic code but with the cultural code as well. Thus, language and culture can have profound effects on how students respond to and comprehend literature. The aim of this article, therefore, is to investigate the effect of these two factors on Arab student response to authentic American literature. Part of a major study, the article analyses quantitatively and qualitatively the responses of 23 female students while reading the American short story “I Want to Be Miss America”. The analysis shows clearly how students’ native culture and language come into play during the process of reading and understanding the text. Appreciating the effect of these factors offers literature teachers an insight into the sources of student difficulties with native literature. This in turn enhances their ability to negotiate meaning with their students and arrive at a plausible understanding of the target text. A further consequence is improved language acquisition by the students (Cheon, 2003). Index Terms—native culture, foreign language, authentic literature, reader response I. INTRODUCTION The importance for the reading process of foreign language students‟ cultural orientation and background knowledge has long been recognized. Schema theory acknowledges reading‟s interactive nature (Rumelhart, 1981; Bensoussan, 1998), which involves a simultaneous interplay of bottom-up and top-down processes. Given problems around culture and background, therefore, it is not only a text‟s linguistic features that can prevent comprehension but content-related factors too. Research found that when textual information matches a reader‟s background knowledge, greater comprehension and recall take place (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1988; Millan, 1999; Cheng, 2000). By contrast, mismatch between textual input and a reader‟s background knowledge creates difficulties, which also happens if incoming textual data is totally new. When recalling texts with information at odds with their pre-existing schema, readers tend to omit or distort the new input (Carrell, 1981). The conclusion seems to be that readers‟ personal prior knowledge is conditioned by their culture (Al-Seyabi, 2010; Millan, 1999; Al-Arfaj, 1996; Prichard, 1990). Put simply, texts containing familiar cultural content are easier to read and recall than, say, linguistically equivalent texts that contain unfamiliar information about a distant culture. Reading the literature of a second or foreign language inevitably involves a struggle. As Urlab (2008, p. 26) puts it, “Reading literature across cultures is not only a reading process or a language process, but it is also influenced by the reader‟s cultural knowledge structures in the form of mental schemata”. ESL/EFL readers experience difficulty because they naturally approach the literary text from a knowledge base within their own culture (Bouzenirh, 1991; Barnett, 1989). Scott (2001) holds that when students read texts with unfamiliar information they overcompensate for absent schema by reading slowly or by guessing, which of course may well cause a failure of comprehension (Nuttall, 1996; Scarcella & Oxford, 1992). When students lack an appropriate schema, the teacher must help them to build it in order to achieve a plausible interpretation of unfamiliar literary texts. It should be done interactively with both teachers and students negotiating meaning by sharing background knowledge and cultural orientation. This kind of dialogue, while generating meaning, improves language acquisition and critical thinking. However, EFL literature classes are often highly teacher-centered, with the teacher‟s voice dominant, a practice which, research has shown, deters language learning (Fisher; cited in Akers, 2009). Dialogue, on the other hand, empowers students allowing them to put into the foreign language personal experience, so that the language acquires life and real significance for them. If their own cultural experiences are explored alongside the text‟s, misunderstanding is avoided and literary appreciation fostered. This view is firmly