A study of the inter-relationship between basic sentence structures used in " Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone" by J.K. Rowling and the reading comprehension of freshmen english Major student at Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University

The purposed of this study were to analyze basic English sentence structures; simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence and compound-complex sentence used in the selected pages from nine chapters of the famous novel “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling, following the theories of Otasonkawat (2002), Jones (2006), Magginson (2007) and Beare (2007) and study the inter-relationship between these basic structures and the reading comprehension of Freshmen English Major Students at Ubon Ratchathani Rajabhat University.
Results obtained from the study indicated that the simple sentence structure was mostly used among the 463 sentences under investigation. The complex sentences ranked second on the list, with the number of 157 sentences or 33.91%, followed by the compound-complex, and compound structure respectively. Some of the sentences found in the analysis were then put in the comprehension test to find out how they affect the participants’ reading comprehension. It was found that only 1 out of the 15 participants passed the test, leading to a conclusion that all sentence types could cause difficulties in the reading comprehension. However, the participants of this study tended to have the most problem with the compound-complex structure.