Teaching literature to students not working in their native language presents problems different from those of native speakers. Two teachers undertaking this task decided to evaluate how well cultural information details such as landscape and weather are presented to students reading a text. After teaching Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to graduate and upper level undergraduate students in a private college in Taiwan, the teachers designed a questionnaire to elicit students’ responses to some
important symbols frequently used in Hawthorne’s fiction. Somewhat to our surprise, the results of our small endeavor seem to indicate that repeated symbols in a text somehow are perceived accurately, at least in their total impact, despite a reader’s lack of knowledge about the details. Our results may encourage teachers of literature to ESL students.