The Effect of Syntax Surgery Strategy on Iraqi EFL Preparatory School Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills

Abstract

Although curricular reforms in EFL education in Iraq have been maintained, the issue of reading comprehension remains an obstacle to the preparatory school students. Despite high emphasis on vocabulary teaching, comparatively little is given to sentence-level syntactic processing, which is required to build textual sense. In this paper, the researcher will look at how the Syntax Surgery Strategy influences reading comprehension levels of Irish EFL preparatory school students. The study design was a quasi-experimental pretest- posttest control group study design that involved 98 fourth-year preparatory students; an experimental group (n = 48) and a control group (n = 50) were taught using sentence segmentation and syntactic reconstruction exercises, respectively. The test on reading comprehension developed by a researcher, which was validated by an expert review and pilot tests, was conducted before and after the intervention. The independent samples t-tests, paired samples t-tests, and measures of effect size were used to analyze data. The research aims to find out whether it is true that the structured syntactic manipulation enhances sentence-level parsing and the overall reading comprehension. It is hoped that the results will have implications in strategy-driven reading pedagogy in low-resource EFL settings and be able to offer empirical evidence regarding the incorporation of syntactic awareness into the teaching of reading at the secondary level.