Investigating the Significance of Syntactic and Semantic Knowledge in the Prediction of Reading Comprehension across Varying Proficiency Levels

Recent theories have suggested that reading comprehension occurs as a result of the interaction between language proficiency, low, and high level linguistic processing of the texts. The assumption is that after achieving a threshold level of language competence of the materials, the reader is able to automatically process the linguistic data along with the higher-level processes of the texts which lead to the comprehension of the texts. Thus, the current investigation was an attempt to examine the relative contribution of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ two types of linguistic knowledge (i.e., vocabulary as well as grammatical knowledge) to reading comprehension performance at various language proficiency levels. To fulfill the purpose of this experimental study, ۱۴۰ male and female EFL learners were randomly selected from different EFL classes and were divided into three groups of language proficiency levels including elementary, intermediate, and advanced according to their performance on a standard placement test. Then the participants in these three groups took three tests of vocabulary, grammar, and reading comprehension based on their language proficiency level. The outcomes of standard multiple regression analysis demonstrated that the contribution of the vocabulary and grammar components is level-dependent. To put it another way, the contribution of vocabulary component is superior to the grammar component at elementary levels of language proficiency and as the language proficiency augments the grammar component predicts more of the variance in reading comprehension than that of the vocabulary component. The implications are accordingly discussed and some considerations for further research studies are recommended.