Abstract: This research examined the development of phonological skills among poor English learners and also analyzed the relationship between phonological skills, syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension ability. The results showed that although measures of pseudoword reading and syntactic awareness successfully discriminated between average and poor readers, no significant difference was found in their performance in phonological awareness, auditory verbal working memory, and visual verbal working memory. The result of stepwise regression indicated that pseudoword reading, syntactic awareness, phonological awareness and auditory verbal working memory were the stronger predictors of English reading comprehension.

Key words: English poor learners, phonological skills, syntactic awareness, reading comprehension