The Effect of Cultural Knowledge on Reading Comprehension of Iranian EFL learners

In the ideal language class, the teaching of culture is an integral, organized component of the course content. People believe that the cultural knowledge is as important as proficiency in their language uses. As teaching culture is an important parameter in learning a foreign language, this proposal aims to explore the effect of cultural knowledge on reading comprehension of EFL learners. For this purpose, 60 EFL learners from three classes will be divided randomly into three groups, a control group and two experimental groups. They are 30 male and 30 female students in grade nine at Shahid Barzgar guidance school in Takab,West Azarbijan. The control group will not receive any special treatment, whereas one experimental group receives texts of British culture (BC) and another experimental group receives texts of Persian culture as well as British one (P- BC) for eight sessions. The data will be analyzed via ANOVA. The findings indicate that the learners in the P-BC group outperform the ones in the other two groups in the posttest. Further, the findings will display that learners from the BC group will be better than the ones in the control group.