Affiliation:
1. I-Shou University, Taiwan
Abstract
In this chapter, the author investigated the effects of a web-based cumulative sentence analysis (CSA) instruction on university engineering students' English reading comprehension. The results of two empirical studies were presented. The findings showed that the experimental group achieved a higher level of reading comprehension performance following the instruction. Inter-group comparison also revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the post-test, while no difference was found between these groups in the pre-test. The questionnaire showed the majority of the students have perceived positive learning outcome in reading comprehension after the CSA instruction. The positive correlation between the post-test and online CSA test indicates that learners' syntactic analysis ability can benefit their reading comprehension. By presenting the instructional framework, this study has contributed to the empirical research concerning the effect of syntactic competence on English as a foreign language (EFL) reading comprehension.