Abstract:
This dissertation attempts to examine the effect of teaching grammatical cohesive devices to foreign language learners on the reading comprehension. Being a crucial issue for foreign language students, particularly at the university level where students are required to read as much as they can, reading comprehension is therefore a skill to be mastered in order to achieve a better understanding of reading passages. With the assumption that a thorough teaching of the major grammatical cohesive devices to first year university students, a
substantial improvement in students’ reading comprehension may be achieved. The reading text becomes therefore easier for the students and understanding can occur. To assess reading comprehension, a two-part test has been proposed to first-year university groups: an
experimental group and a control one. The former has been taught the major connective ties whereas the second one has not. On the other hand, the two groups underwent the same tests. The results show that the experimental group could to a great extent answer the two tests, i.e. the cloze procedure and text comprehension test whereas the control group failed. On the basis of these findings, some suggestions have been directed to instructors and to syllabus designers. Students’ apprehension of the reading comprehension has to be weakened through
an explicit teaching of the connectives ties. Intense practice of the connective ties through cloze procedures, inference and reference questions, multiple choice questions are other activities teachers have to design. Besides the teaching of the grammatical cohesive devices,
instructors should also be aware of other important elements to teach such as vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation, in order to realize an effective comprehension of the reading passages.
