the role of explicit teaching sentence constituent structure in english reading comprehension: a research on intermediate iranian learners

framed in x-bar theories, the present study looks into the effect of constituent structure (cs) instruction on the intermediate iranian learners’ reading comprehension ability. to do so, 40 language learners studying in private language school took part in the study and were divided into one experimental and one control group. to collect the desirable data, the learners took the pre-test of reading comprehension as well as the post-test to compare their performance before and after the cs instruction. quantitative findings of this analytic study, analyzed by version 16 of spss software, revealed that the learners’ reading comprehension ability was improved as a result of cs instruction (p=.003). cs instruction can be applied as a tool to enhance the learners’ reading comprehension ability.