Cultural Schemata and Nativization of Reading: I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud by William Wordsworth

Abstract

Abstract

 

     Reading involves both cognitive and psychological activities of combining both pre-existing cultural and linguistic knowledge. The reader has the ability to view the world in the light of his/her own cultural experiences which are constructed consciously or unconsciously, and may seem to be fruitful in text analysis and exploring  the uncovered multi layers of meanings. In relation to multifaceted cross-cultural environment and experiences, people world view undergoes a dynamic change due to their distinct norms, values, attributed to specific objects. The purpose of the study focuses on to collect feedback from the EFL learners on culturally nativizatized literary poem, ‘‘I wandered Lonely as a Cloud’’ by William Wordsworth, analyzed and discussed during reading process.  This study aims to explain how EFL learners with distinct cultural schemata read, and interpret a western culturally loaded texts differently. It also attempts to indicate how visual images, setting and figurative language of the nativized text may contribute to their interpretation and reading comprehension level. As a result, in reading nativized version and non-nativized version, they indicated similarities and differences in their responses and interpretations in these culturally overloaded discourses. The respondents, in this study, reflected different images and structures through nativization.  In this qualitative study, the data was collected and analyzed by comparing familiar and unfamiliar contents of two distinct versions in the form of the learners’ feedback through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The study asks for further investigation to look into the effect of cultural specific concepts on cross-cultural literary texts.