Theories of reading development emphasize the importance of syntactic skills, which involve understanding and manipulating sentence structures, in relation to reading comprehension. Some researchers regard syntactic skills to be universal predictors of reading comprehension. A recent meta-analysis by Tong and colleagues investigated the relation between syntactic skills and reading comprehension for two languages with distinctive syntactic structure: Chinese and English.

The meta-analysis included a total of 59 articles, comprising 75 independent samples and 235 correlations. Among these, 37 studies had participants whose first language was English, while 22 studies involved participants whose first language was Chinese.  The results of the meta-analysis are shown below:

• Overall, a positive moderate correlation was found between syntactic skills and reading comprehension (r=+0.54). There was no significant difference in this correlation between English and Chinese (r = +0.54 for both languages).
• For English language studies, correlations were generally higher among secondary school students compared to lower grade students. Regarding Chinese language, only studies of elementary and secondary schools were available. The magnitudes were similar at early elementary (r = 0.57 English, r = 0.56 Chinese) and upper elementary (r=0.53 English, r = 0.50 Chinese) for both languages.
• The correlations between reading comprehension and various syntactic tasks were as follows: the largest was found for recalling sentences (r=+0.59), followed by error detection/correction (r=+0.55), word order (r=+0.53), oral cloze (r=+0.49), and sentence-picture matching (r = +0.49).
• The correlation between oral cloze task and reading comprehension was significantly stronger in Chinese than in English. However, the two tasks exhibited similarity between two languages: error detection / correction (r=+0.57 English; r=+0.53 Chinese) and word order task (r=+0.52 English; r=+0.53 Chinese).
• No significant difference was found between modality of syntactic task: oral (r=+0.55) and written (r=+0.53). Moreover, correlations in the oral mode were similar across the two languages (r=0.54 English; r=0.58 Chinese).

The authors noted that the striking similarity in effect sizes suggests a universal role of syntactic skills in reading comprehension across English and Chinese. Therefore, comprehensive theories of reading comprehension should include syntactic skills as an integral component.

Source: Tong, X., Yu, L., & Deacon, S. H. (2024). A meta-analysis of the relation between syntactic skills and reading comprehension: A cross-linguistic and developmental investigation. Review of Educational Research, 00346543241228185. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543241228185