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according to different languages. They claim that certain strategies for reading will be language-specific rather than universal. (See Flores d’Arcals, 1990) For example, the Chinese readers often get hindered by the garden path sentences, such as “The horse raced past the barn fell.” This sentence is perfectly grammatical, but almost impossible to understand. The reason for this is that as readers read the sentence, they usually build up a syntactic structure in which “the horse” is the subject of the sentence and “raced past the barn” is the main VP of the sentence. When they get to the word “fell”, they found there’s no room for an extra VP. In the correct interpretation for the sentence, “fell” is the head of the main VP and “raced past the barn” is a clause that attaches to the NP “the horse”. On the discourse level, Carrel (1984) found that students from different language backgrounds were able to recall relevant information better depending on different organizational structures of texts. She concludes that different cultures may prefer different ways of organizing information; thus, comprehension of texts may be culturally dependent according to the logical organization of the text. For instance, the Chinese students prefer to state out the main idea or the theme at the end of the text while English students prefer the beginning. Social context differences also have some impacts on Chinese readers during their English reading. It has been argued that students who come from cultures where written material represents “truth” might tend not to challenge or reinterpret text in light of other texts. For example, in Chinese culture, “red” stands for “good luck”, but it turns into the contrary meaning in English. When describing a coward person, the Chinese students often relate him to a mouse (老鼠)， while English students are likely to relate him to a pigeon (鸽子) or a chick (鸡). As a result, possible misunderstanding may arise, if a Chinese student doesn’t keep the difference in mind when he comes across a word “pigeon-hearted” or “chicken-hearted”. A large body of literature has also argued that prior knowledge of text –related information strongly affects reading comprehension (Anderson＆Pearaon, 1984; Bransford, Stein,＆Shelton, 1984; Kintsch＆Van Dijk,1978; Wilson＆Anderson, 1986). In sum, the social context differences have a profound effect on Chinese reader in the English reading. In addition to the influences on English reading of Chinese students discussed above, they are also influences from the students themselves. For instance, influence from cognitive factors. Chinese people’s thinking pattern is different from English people. Chinese people prefer to the circular thinking pattern, while English people the linear one. So when a Chinese student is reading the English material, usually written according to the linear pattern of thought, he will feel difficult to read at a considerably high speed as he always can’t help inverting his circular pattern of thought into the linear one during his reading process. Although there are so many negative influences on Chinese readers during their English reading process, the influences can be greatly decreased if the readers have a strong sense of language. For example, Chinese readers with stronger sense of language are more accustomed to think in English, and this may do ease to their language processing, which will in turn decrease the negative influences caused by language