A Quasi-Experimental Study on the Effect of Syntactic Awareness Instruction on Reading Comprehension of Adult English Learners

Many adult English language learners (ELL) struggling with academic reading find it challenging to comprehend the texts due to lack of syntactic awareness. Failure to develop adequate second language (L2) reading proficiency seriously undermines the potential academic and career success of adult ELLs. Researchers have suggested a contributive role of syntactic awareness in academic reading performance for adult ELLs. However, a gap has been identified in the literature with respect to what constitutes explicit instruction of syntactic awareness and the precise nature of the relationship between these two variables. The purpose of this quantitative study was to evaluate the efficacy of a 7-week syntactic awareness instruction and investigate a possible causal link between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. The study adopted a quasi-experimental pretest and posttest non-equivalent control group design, using a Paired Samples t-test and the mixed within-subjects between-subjects SPANOVA for data analysis. The participants for the study were 68 adult ELLs in a pre-college English program of a Texas community college. Via a variety of measurements, participants' syntactic awareness and reading comprehension were assessed for data collection and analysis. The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in syntactic awareness for the participants receiving the 7-week intervention between the pretest (M = 30.97, SD = 11.52) and the posttest (M = 42.24, SD = 14.461), t (32) = -5.92, p = .000. This key finding may offer a pedagogical classroom-based model to raise syntactic awareness and show that syntactic awareness could be improved by training. However, although pretest to posttest differences in reading comprehension were significant for both the treatment and control groups, there was no significant difference in reading comprehension between the two groups. Based on the results, it is recommended that raising syntactic awareness be part of L2 reading pedagogy in the classroom instruction. Further research is also encouraged to include a larger sample size from the population and other extraneous variables to examine possibly different impacts of syntax awareness on adult readers who are at different stages of L2 development.