The effect of genre structure on reading comprehension ability of Iranian EFL learners

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of text structure instruction on reading comprehension of narrative and expository texts. 80 students were assigned to four groups. EG1 and CG1 were given a narrative pretest. Then, EG1 received instruction of narrative structures and CG1 received some example of narrative text without instruction. And after five sessions the posttests were given. EG2 and CG2 participated in an expository pretest. The EG1 received the instruction of expository structure in five sessions but control group did not receive any instruction. Then expository posttests were given. T-tests were used to test the hypotheses of this study. The results indicated that the instruction of narrative structure affected reading comprehension ability of learners. However, the expository text structure did not affect reading comprehension ability of the students. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.