The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of a cross-cultural lesson on learners’ reading anxiety and critical thinking related to empathy by using the learners’ mother culture as schema. As research materials for this study, the Korean film ‘Physiognomy’ and the play ‘Macbeth’ were selected. The subjects were divided into two groups: the control group who read the play but did not view the film and the experimental group who read it after watching the movie. After four weeks of the reading classes, each group’s reading anxiety and critical thinking related to empathy were measured, and the results are as follows. First, there was a difference between the control group and the experimental group in terms of reading anxiety. The subjects in the experimental group felt less reading anxiety than the control group. Second, by using the Korean film as prior knowledge of their mother culture, the subjects in the experimental group expanded their empathy about the characters in the play more than the control group did. The results have pedagogical implications for English reading classes.