Effect Of Syntactic Knowledge On College Students’ English Reading Competence

Most foreign language learners learn a foreign language by reading to obtaineffective information. As a carrier of speech and information based on articles reading isa speech process of cognitive construction on written materials. English readingcomprehension has long been considered as the most important part in language teaching.Therefore, the applied linguists and language teachers have paid much attention toEnglish reading. In the reading comprehension, the quantity of answering the questionscorrectly and quickly is an important indicator to disclose reading competence, namely,reading competence includes reading speed and accuracy of reading. Language learnersextract the main point of paragraphs and articles through reading. Syntactic analysisinevitably plays an important role in the process of reading. Syntactic analysis has animportant role in language understanding; and it is also a necessary strategy in languageunderstanding. With the syntactic analysis, language learners can correctly understandthe words and syntactic logical relations between words, distinguish polysemy inparticular the specific meaning of the sentence, accurately analyze sentence structure,and achieve language understanding.This thesis explores the feasibility and effectiveness of strengthening andconsolidating syntactic knowledge to improve college student’s English readingcompetence through a quasi-experimental research. The author tries to find acombination between syntactic analysis and the reading, and goes together to grasp thesyntactic knowledge with the readers. The aim is to help foreign language learnersimprove the accuracy of reading comprehension. Seventy non-English major sophomoresin Anyang City Polytechnic College participate in the present research. In order to getmore objective and direct information, the author carries out an experimental research inthis study. The number of students in the experimental group and the control group isequal, and there are thirty-five students in each group. This research lasts fourteen weeks,collects data through the questionnaire and tests and adopts the software SPSS to analyze the statistics. The results of the experiment show after strengthening and consolidatingsyntactic knowledge the subjects’ reading competence in the experimental group is muchbetter than that of the control group. It demonstrates that mastery of syntactic knowledgeis more useful in developing college students’ reading proficiency. According to acombination of qualitative and quantitative analysis and based on traditional syntacticknowledge and syntactic theories combined by semantics and cognitive linguistics, tostrengthen and consolidate the syntactic knowledge benefits students’ reading ability andthe effectiveness of reading comprehensible input. Syntactic exercises enable students toachieve their own syntactic mapping to enhance self-learning and understanding ofautomated reading. The research draws attention of the relationship between syntacticknowledge and reading competence. In addition, it also promotes the research ofimproving college reading competence.