Abstract
In the realm of reading comprehension, syntactic knowledge has generated a great deal of debate among the researchers who believe in the effectiveness of teaching vocabulary through different methods and strategies, and those who believe in the effectiveness of syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension. The present study investigated the contribution of learners’ syntactic knowledge, namely discourse markers and relative clauses in reading comprehension. A quasi-experimental design was used. Two groups of students were assigned as experimental and control groups. The performances of students in the experimental group were compared with the performances of students in the control group. A series of t- tests was run to determine the impact of syntactic knowledge on reading comprehension. Comparing the mean score of the experimental group with that of the control group on the post-test revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group (p= .000 DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1p578
Highlights
Had reading been the cynosure of old methods, and it had received more attention from modern methods
There are a number of research projects being published about discourse markers (DMs), a topic which has turned into a growth industry in linguistics
Research Question In order to investigate the possible contributions of syntactic knowledge, mainly DMs and relative clauses, this study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of developing such knowledge on students’ performance in reading comprehension
Summary
Had reading been the cynosure of old methods, and it had received more attention from modern methods. Bernhardt and James (1987) argued that comprehension is a topic dependent process It is the reader who starts processing the text from the beginning, so it involves making proper decisions during reading it. Zwicky (1985) expressed an interest in DMs as a class when he wrote: Within the great collection of things that have been labeled ‘particles’, we find at least on grammatically significant class of items, in English and in languages generally. These have been variously termed ‘discourse particles’ and ‘interjections’; here I will call them ‘discourse markers’. On the grounds of distribution, prosody, and meaning, discourse markers can be seen to form a class (p. 292)
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