İngilizceyi yabancı dil olarak öğrenen Türk öğrencilerin İngilizce okuduğunu anlama becerisinde İngilizce sözcük ve yapı bilgisinin rolü

The primary objective of the current study is to investigate the role of L2 lexical (breadth and depth) and syntactic knowledge in L2 reading comprehension of adult Turkish EFL learners. Moreover, the study aims to find out the contribution of L2 lexical and syntactic knowledge to L2 reading comprehension of Turkish EFL students having different L2 reading proficiency levels. With these purposes, the data of the study were collected through a Reading Comprehension Test compiled from TOEFL, Vocabulary Levels Test, Word Associates Test, and Syntactic Knowledge Test from 254 Turkish university students learning English as a foreign language. After the data gathered from the whole sample were analyzed, the participants were divided into two groups based on their reading comprehension test scores. The results of the study showed that although vocabulary breadth, depth and syntactic knowledge positively and significantly correlated with L2 reading comprehension, only vocabulary breadth and syntactic knowledge predicted L2 reading comprehension of the whole sample. Moreover, the predictive power of syntactic knowledge was found to be higher than that of vocabulary breadth. Similarly, syntactic knowledge outperformed in terms of predictive power in L2 reading comprehension of the participants having high reading comprehension level. On the other hand, only vocabulary breadth made the largest and significant contribution to L2 reading comprehension of the participants with low reading comprehension level.