| Reading plays an essential role in FL learning, since it not only provides important input for FL learners but also lays a foundation for their further development in listening, speaking and writing. Much of the research has attached much importance to the role of discourse analysis played in FL reading. As a result, the effect of syntactic knowledge seemed to be neglected to certain degree. This thesis, based on an empirical study, tries to examine the effects of the two factors on EFL learners'reading performance, so as to further explore the cognitive processes of reading comprehension and to provide references for the learning and teaching of reading in the future.The present study aims to investigate which variable, the syntactic knowledge or discourse knowledge, is more influential to EFL reading comprehension. 95 non-English major sophomores from a key university participated in the test. All of them had passed CET4 and were preparing for the CET6 examination, so the test was designed according to the Syllabus for College English Test---Band Six. In order to guarantee the quality and reliability, the test material was checked by two professors who had a good understanding of the subjects'English proficiency and knew which materials they had or hadn't done. After being revised by the professors, the test paper was then presented to the subjects. There were 3 parts in the test, test for syntactic knowledge, discourse knowledge and reading comprehension respectively. The syntactic knowledge test was subdivided into sentence structure analysis, error correction and sentence combination, aiming to evaluate subjects'acquisition and employment of syntactic knowledge globally and locally. Discourse knowledge test also had three parts, cloze, paragraph headings and paragraph ordering. Cloze focused on the microstructural knowledge and the other two focused on the macrostructural knowledge. Reading comprehension included reading in depth and skimming and scanning. 89 test papers were selected as the valid data of the present study. The data of the test was then analyzed by the SPSS software.According to the results, for the test of syntactic knowledge, error correction and sentence combination are closely related to reading, but sentence structure analysis shows no significant correlation with it; as to the test of discourse knowledge, cloze highly predicts reading comprehension, but paragraph headings and ordering are hardly related to it. This means that the knowledge of cohesion is much more influential than that of text patterns. In conclusion, both syntactic and discourse knowledge are influential to EFL reading comprehension, and discourse knowledge is more influential to it than syntactic knowledge.Based on an analysis and discussion of the results, the author suggests the teachers should not ignore the importance of syntactic in the future. At the same time, they are recommended to strengthen the teaching of discourse knowledge, especially the microstructural knowledge. |
