THE EFFECT OF CULTURAL FAMILIARITY ON THE IRANIAN LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ PERFORMANCE AND USE OF COGNITIVE AND METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES IN READING COMPREHENSION

As an academic endeavor in the field of reading comprehension and strategy research in English as a foreign language (EFL) settings, this study intended to investigate first whether a culturally familiar content had any facilitating effect on the readers’ comprehension, and second whether the participants receiving either culturally familiar or unfamiliar content differed in terms of their cognitive and metacognitive strategy deployment. To these ends, 73 participants, being divided into control and experimental groups, provided the necessary data. Each group was given either a culturally familiar or unfamiliar story and subsequently received reading comprehension tests followed by a cognitive-metacognitive questionnaire. Data analysis revealed that first, the culturally familiar content had some facilitating effects on the participants’ reading comprehension; and second, the participants who received the culturally familiar story employed lower degrees of cognitive and metacognitive strategies. The study’s findings have some implications for language teachers choosing the most suitable textbooks among culturally familiar and unfamiliar materials as well as curriculum and textbook developers taking into account the promising effects of culturally familiar contents on learners’ comprehension.