n the following section, the elicited L2 learners' comprehension problems resulting from lack or insufficiency of grammatical knowledge are classified and then the techniques used for their elimination are presented.
A. The classification of comprehension problems resulting from insufficiency or lack of grammatical knowledge
1. Recognizing and understanding different kinds of phrases and determining their head noun
2. Recognizing and understanding different kinds of clauses and determining their grammatical function
3. Recognizing the main sentence in a complex sentence and consequently failing to recognize the main verb of the sentence
4. Retrieving the omitted parts of a sentence (where ellipsis occurs)
5. Recognizing the role of conjunctive adverbs
6. Recognizing the reference of the pronouns
7. Recognizing and understanding the tense of the verb
8. Recognizing two-part verbs
9. Understanding the reversed parts
10. Understanding the passive sentences
11. Lack of knowledge of Phrase breaking/ chunking/ clustering
12. Recognizing the idiomatic expressions and phrasal verbs
13. Lack of knowledge of collocations
14. False generalizations or stereotyping about words with similar spelling or pronunciation
B. Techniques for overcoming grammatical problems which hinder reading comprehension A combination of the following techniques was used to highlight the significant role of grammar in reading comprehension.
1. Asking Wh questions and answering them in order to elicit the semantic and syntactic relationship between different parts of a complex and/or compound sentence
2. Raising students' consciousness about the role of punctuation marks in reading comprehension
3. Bringing the omitted parts back to their original place
4. Identifying the main sentence and the dependent sentence (s) in complex-compound sentences and understanding their semantic and syntactic relationship
5. Identifying the reference of the pronouns
6. Simplifying long sentences by omitting pre- and post-modifiers of nouns and adjective clauses whether restrictive or nonrestrictive
7. Learning how to use the grammatical information available in monolingual dictionaries
8. Learning "phrase breaking" and recognizing phrases in long sentences to promote reading comprehension and increase its speed
9. Identifying the head noun of different kinds of phrases Zahra Akbari / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 98 (2014) 122 – 126 125
10. Paraphrasing the seemingly difficult sentences by using already known, simpler grammatical patterns
11. Bringing back the reversed sentences to their original places
12. Understanding the role of implicit/explicit conjunctions to promote reading comprehension and to increase its speed
13. Recycling and reviewing the key grammatical points while teaching reading comprehension so that learners get adequate exposure to the real use of grammatical points
14. Asking learners to search for the grammatical points (explained in the grammar section) in their reading texts to discover the connection between the reading and grammar
15. Designing English course books in a way that the given grammatical point explained in the grammar section being the key, frequently used grammatical point in its related reading passage in each unit/lesson