Abstract: This is a summary about the relationship between children’s syntactic awareness and reading ability. At first, it introduces the definition of the syntactic awareness and the tasks those researchers use to measure it, including oral-cloze task, sentence judgment and correction task, error imitation, analyzing the syntactic context congruence, syntactic priming and so on. And then, the development of the theories and studies about the relationship between children’s syntactic awareness and their reading ability since 1970s is reviewed. Finally, it summarizes the problems that should be resolved in future

Key words: metalinguistic awareness, syntactic awareness, reading ability