Grammatical Sensitivity Task and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from Iranian Undergraduate ESP Learners

The study here had the impetus to investigate whether an intervention of a grammatical sensitivity task would enhance a better reading comprehension achievement among Iranian undergraduate ESP learners majoring accounting. To achieve this purpose, 40 Iranian undergraduate ESP learners of accounting were selected via administering an OPT, and participated in the experiment of the study. They were divided into an experimental and a comparison group and were exposed to a pre-test of reading comprehension; then the experimental group received 5 sessions of grammatical sensitivity task treatment (GJ Tests) while the control group received a placebo. Finally, the posttest was administered to both groups. The data were analyzed via running the independent samples T-test between the posttests, and the paired-sample T-tests was used to indicate the possible progress of the groups. The results revealed a better performance of the experimental group receiving higher scores in the reading comprehension posttest after 5 session of treatment. Investigating the effect of grammatical sensitivity on Iranian ESP reading comprehension learners in a meta-analysis process was supposed to be the main impetus for the present study. It was performed through analyzing the learners’ reading comprehension test performance results which were done comparatively between the pretest and the posttest of the experimental and control groups independently. It was revealed that the participants with higher degree of grammatical sensitivity reflected a more acceptable achievement performance in their ESP reading comprehension test.