摘要：The present study attempted to investigate the effect of rural and urban orientations on top-down and bottom-up reading models of the Iranian EFL students. To do this, the researcher selected two groups of EFL learners, one rural and the other, urban. To determine the socio-cultural status of the subjects, a demographic questionnaire was given to both groups. Then, the subjects were made homogeneous by administering a language proficiency test, Nelson. It is noteworthy that Nelson test had already been standardized. After that previously validated ten reading passages including top-down and bottom-up items were administered to both groups. The experiment lasted for ten sessions and the statistical analyses used in this study comprised a t-test to determine the homogeneity of the groups, a two-way ANOVA and Scheffe test. The results showed that in addition to bottom-up model, the urban students made use of top-down strategy including inferences, skimming for the main ideas, guessing the meaning of words from context, activating background knowledge, and focusing on the author's message, whereas rural subjects showed great reliance on texts and the application of bottom-up processing i.e. they heavily relied on the main content of the text, they never incorporated the knowledge of the world as well as their prior knowledge to answer reading comprehension questions.
