摘要：Basing on the interactive model of comprehension and learning, this study investigated the teaching of text structure among EFL Iranian students and its effects on their reading comprehension. It was designed with the assumption that readers who already have the knowledge of the organizational patterns of text will be aware of text structure and will use it as a strategy to comprehension. Therefore the use of text structure, or the structure strategy, will enhance their comprehension and learning from text. Fifty six students of intermediate level, divided into two groups of control and experimental, participated in this study. Students attempted a pre and a post reading comprehension tests before and after the training procedure which involved an extra treatment on rhetorical structures for the experimental group. The performance of these two groups was compared using t-test. Study results revealed that experimental students who employed text structure had significantly higher performance on the multiple choice reading comprehension questions than those who did not receive any training on text structure. This indicates that the knowledge of text structure may have facilitated their comprehension and learning from text. Therefore, the explicit teaching of expository text structure knowledge and the effective use of structure strategy could be inserted in the instructional program of second/foreign language learners.
