Investigating the Effects of Different Explicit Syntactic MarkerTypes on Sentence Comprehension of EFL Learners: Do Age andProficiency Level Matter?

This study was designed to highlight the potential effects of different types of Explicit Syntactic Markers (ESMs) on the sentence comprehension of EFL learners of different age-range and proficiency levels. Consequently, two hundred and forty beginners, intermediate, and advanced Iranian EFL learners were selected via purposive sampling procedure from an initial pool of six hundred and sixty learners (from three private language learning institutes) based on their performance on McMillan Placement Test (MPT) and subsequently, they were categorized into two age-groups of teenagers and adults. An online software application (Com-Chron) was utilized to provide learners with a set of ESM and non-ESM English sentences on the screen to measure the accurate comprehension and the elapsed time needed to perceive the presented sentences. Data analyses revealed that participants had a meaningfully better comprehension of ESM items (though they were longer sentences than non-ESM items). Furthermore, "proficiency level," unlike "age," was found to cause a statistically significant difference in comprehending ESM sentences. It was also concluded that different types of explicit syntactic markers imposed different degrees of comprehension difficulty both in terms of accuracy and the needed time for the participants’ comprehension; sentences with “punctuation marks” and “conjunctions” were the easiest for the participants while those including “determiners” and “link breaks” were the most challenging. Regression analysis also implied that all the ESMs (except for “link breaks”) can significantly contribute to English sentence comprehension and can be assumed as comprehension predictors to various degrees.

کلیدواژه ها:

English sentence comprehension ، Explicit syntactic markers (ESMs) ، Comprehension difficulty ، Comprehension time and accuracy