On the Relationship between Relative Clause Awareness and Reading Comprehension: The Assessment Test for Syntactic Awareness

Not knowing syntactic structures is one of the reasons behind weak reading comprehension. Poor readers may not be able to recognize syntactic structures and instead of processing the whole text, prefer word by word reading. Given the semantic and syntactic features of the relative clauses, the issue of syntactic awareness has been widely investigated by many researchers. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the relationship between the syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. In addition, an effort is made to develope an assessment tool for syntactic awareness. This study recruited a cumulative number of 160 male and female primary school grade four students (9-11 years old) through multi-stage cluster sampling, from three region of Tehran. The data collection instruments include reading literacy tests containing literary and informational texts (tests of PIRLS) to assess reading comprehension and researcher-made syntactic test to assess the syntactic awareness. Correlation and regression analyses were done to generate the descriptive report. Regression analyses revealed that the syntactic awareness potentially predicts reading comprehension. Syntactic awareness is one of the factors affecting reading comprehension. It is therefore necessary for educational planners to consider this variable as one of the determinants for students’ reading comprehension.