The Relationship between Explicit Teaching of Grammatical Structures and Iranian High School Students’ Performance in Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between explicit teaching of grammatical structures and reading comprehension. The significance of this study lies in the possibility that knowledge of text structure may create connections among the disciplines which could enhance understanding of content and promote thinking and reading comprehension abilities.  After administering a standardized reading comprehension test, a group of 64  high school students were selected from a total population of 84.The selected subjects were randomaly assigned to experimental and control groups. For the experimental group, the researcher held a treatment which lasted for 4 weeks, two 90 minute sessions per week. During the experiment both groups had the same instructor, curriculum, and schedule of instruction, except that in control group the students had conventional learning, that is they worked just with the reading passages without any explicit instruction or without any awareness- by being undelined - about the types of structures which were the target structure of the researcher- adjective clauses, gerunds, and infinitives-, while for the experimental group, they received explicit instruction and  awareness about the types of structures which were the target structure of  the researcher. At the end of the study, the obtained scores on the pre- and post-tests were analyzed through different statistical procedures. The results showed that being aware about sentence structures and the explicit teaching of grammatical structures had a significant effect on improving Iranian high school students’ reading comprehension performance. The results, also indicated that significant relationships exist among the variables of sentence-structure recognition and reading comprehension. The associations support the theory that students may use sentence structure to improve thinking and reading comprehension processes.This association provides educators with a potentially powerful way to structure instruction.