THE EFFECT OF CULTURE TEACHING ON IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ READING ABILITY

Regarding lots of researches and theories about the interrelationship between language and culture, choosing more effective texts for teaching culture to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students to improve their reading skill is the main concern of this paper. In other words, the current study is an attempt to find out whether teaching culture through culture-teaching informative texts as direct channel of teaching culture or short stories as indirect channel of teaching culture in EFL environments can improve ELLs reading skill more effectively. So in a quasi-experimental design consisting of two groups of Iranian EFL students in which direct and indirect cultural texts were used separately, the performance of participants in a multiple choice test of reading general passages was statistically analyzed. The results indicated that teaching culture through direct cultural texts has more positive effect on Iranian ELLs reading skill than teaching it through short stories.