A Study Of The Correlation Between Grammatical Knowledge And Reading Comprehension Ability Of Senior High School Students

Reading comprehension involves continual extraction and integration of text information at phonetic,lexical,syntactic as well as semantic levels.Grammatical knowledge is critical to the comprehension of texts in that it can help readers understand complex sentences and identify cohesive devices.In recent years,many researchers have reached an agreement that implicit and explicit knowledge are two coexistent,distinguishable dimensions of grammatical knowledge.They have discussed issues about the definition,distinction and measurements of implicit grammatical knowledge(IGK)and explicit grammatical knowledge(EGK).However,only limited studies have looked into the role of EGK and IGK in second language(L2)reading comprehension.Therefore,the present study is intended to explore the correlation between high school students' grammatical knowledge and reading comprehension ability by addressing the following research questions:(1)What is the overall situation of high school students' EGK and IGK?(2)What are the relationships between their EGK,IGK and English reading comprehension ability?(3)What are the causes for the differences,if any,between the contribution of EGK and that of IGK to the development of reading comprehension ability?To answer the above-mentioned questions,86 students from a senior high school in Nanjing were selected to participate in this study.A vocabulary level test was firstly employed to measure participants' vocabulary size.A metalinguistic knowledge test,an untimed grammaticality judgment test,and a timed grammaticality judgment test were then conducted in sequence in order to test participants' EGK and IGK.Finally,two timed reading comprehension tests were applied.Each reading passage was followed by four types of reading comprehension questions(i.e.,information searching,gist summarizing,textual inference and word inference)to measure different subskills of reading comprehension ability.Through analyses of test data and the interview,the present study yielded three major findings.Firstly,the developments of high school students' IGK and EGK are not synchronized.Most high school students' EGK outperforms their IGK whether in syntax or morphology,though the gap appears more evident at syntactic level.Secondly,senior high school students' EGK and IGK all significantly correlate with their reading comprehension ability.Then after taking vocabulary knowledge as the control variable,IGK proves to be a better predictor of students' reading comprehension ability than EGK.Finally,IGK exerts greater influence on reading comprehension in that it has closer and more varied relationships with different subskills of reading comprehension ability.To be more specific,IGK significantly correlates with information searching skill and textual inference skill,while EGK only correlates with information searching skill weakly.The above findings suggest that senior high school students' reading comprehension ability is more closely related to IGK than EGK,though there is still a need for them to further improve their IGK.Therefore,on the one hand,English teachers should provide enough input of IGK to promote the internalization of syntactic knowledge;on the other hand,effective teaching activities and tasks should be designed to facilitate the conversion from EGK to IGK.