Dominant Syntactic Structures in Journalistic Texts and Their Effects On the Reading Comprehension of Non-Persian Learners of Persian

Reading comprehension is one of the main language skills which could be expanded by making use of journalistic texts as learning materials. Through reading these texts, the learners could develop their language skills and in the meantime learn about the cultural differences between L1 and L2 communities. The present research explored the capacity of journalistic texts as instructional tools for teaching reading comprehension to non-Persian learners of Persian language. The study investigated the relationship between syntactic complexity and the comprehension of journalistic texts by learners of Persian. 1500 sentences were selected from three popular Iranian newspapers (i.e. Hamshahri, Iran and Jame-Jam) published over a two-months period. From each newspaper, 500 sentences were selected which belonged to social, sports and events categories. After determining the frequency of each syntactically complex pattern, they were classified in terms of Quirk et al.’s model (1985). The syntactic complexity of the patterns was also investigated based on Stein et al.’s (1984) Structural Deficit Hypothesis which asserts that syntactic complexity causes difficulty in understanding compound sentences. A significant relationship was observed between syntactic complexity and comprehension of compound sentences. It was concluded that in most cases, Persian newspaper articles cannot be used to expand reading comprehension in non-Persian learners of Persian since they make vast use of complex and compound sentences, displacement of sentence components, passive sentences and structure omission.