Abstract

This paper will report on a study of reading comprehension which took place in two widely different cultures: Hong Kong, China and Namibia, southern Africa. Introductory comments will define reading comprehension as being made up of a variety of components or skills, such as word knowledge, syntactic knowledge, schematic knowledge etc. Consideration will be given to the effects of social and cultural values on the process of reading. One aspect of reading will be identified as having particular importance in reading comprehension: rhetorical structure. After a brief survey explaining why this feature is of importance, an experiment will be described which took place in Hong Kong (sample size 490) and Namibia (sample size 543) to assess the effect on reading comprehension of different rhetorical organizations. The experiment assessed form three students (average age 14) in six schools. Three schools were in urban Hong Kong, China and three were in urban Windhoek, Namibia They thus represented two very different cultures and very different language groups. Hong Kong students were all Cantonese first language speakers, Namibian students spoke 15 different languages as their mother tongue (broadly designated as Khoisan, Bantu and European). All students were presented with a text, in English, on the topic healthy eating. The texts had been organized into four different rhetorical forms: description, cause-effect, problem-solution and listing. Comprehension was assessed with a text based cloze and recall protocols. Results suggested clear differences in the comprehension of the texts related to which rhetorical organization had been read. There were also clear differences related to language grouping. The reasons for these differences may be related to intercultural rhetoric, but also to differences in pedagogy and to differences in the linguistic construction of English, Chinese, Khoisan and Bantu languages.