Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between word order knowledge and EFL reading comprehension among high school students. The participants were seventy-four second year senior high school students. A written recall test, and three types of sentence anagram tests (basic, intra-phrasal and inter-phrasal anagram tests) were administered to all 70 students. There were significant correlations between word order tests and reading comprehension. Moreover, a 3 (the reading comprehension group) × 3 (types of anagram tests) two-way ANOVA revealed significant interactions. The results indicate that regardless of the levels of reading comprehension, inter-phrasal anagram task is the most difficult. However, the high-level group also shows the significant difference in intra-phrasal anagram task. Therefore, it is concluded that both intra-phrasal word order instructions and inter-phrasal word order instructions should be focused on more for better reading comprehension.
