Dynamical Predictive Power Of English Phonological Awareness, Syntactic Awareness, And Working Memory On English Reading Comprehension

The present study examined the dynamical predictive power of English phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and working memory on English passage reading comprehension with Chinese EFL learners as subjects.161 junior second graders, junior third graders and senior second graders participated in the experiment. The results indicated that working memory was not a significant predictor of English reading comprehension for all the chosen graders. English phonological awareness was the unique significant predictor of English reading comprehension for initial English learners. However, with increasing experience in English reading and further learning in English grammatical knowledge, English syntactic awareness emerged as a significant predictor of English reading comprehension, and its predictive power was stronger than that of the English phonological awareness. For English learners with advanced grammatical knowledge, English syntactic awareness turned out to be the only significant predictive variable. Therefore, the relationship between English phonological awareness, syntactic awareness and English passage reading comprehension appeared to be a dynamical one.