THE JOURNAL OF ASIA TEFL Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2020, 652-661 http://dx.doi.org/10.18823/asiatefl.2020.17.2.23.652 652 The Journal of Asia TEFL http://journal.asiatefl.org/ e-ISSN 2466-1511 © 2004 AsiaTEFL.org. All rights reserved. The Effect of Topicalization and Left Dislocation on Reading Comprehension of Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners Mahdi Mardani Behbahan Khatam Alanbia University of Technology, Iran Shahnaz Arvin Islamic Azad University, Yasuj Branch, Iran Alireza Khoram Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Ahvaz, Iran Introduction As reading is not a mechanical process, readers need to utilize their linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural resources when they break the code, understand the meaning and interpret the written text (Delbridge, 2008). Therefore, knowledge of the structure through which the message is packaged has a very essential role in understanding the meaning of the writer or speaker. The way that information is ordered at the sentence-level is thought to be influenced by information structural concepts, such as topic- comment, given-new, or focus-background (Büring, 2007; Krifka, 2008). Information-structural (IS) features of a sentence are expressed in different ways, which mainly depends on the language properties we are dealing with. In addition to certain morphemes and intonation, one of the most important tools for such procedures is the word order variations of a given sentence (Szűcs, 2014). The following examples are the two English structures, which utilize word-order variation. 1) Apples, I like. 2) Apples, I like them. These examples may seem similar, but they are dealt with differently and have different names in the literature. The first one is an example of “Topicalization” (TOP), while the second one is called “Left- Dislocation” (LD). Both of these examples feature an argument in a non-canonical, left-peripheral position. The major difference between the two is that in topicalization, the canonical position of the fronted constituent is empty (or, from a transformationalist viewpoint, occupied by a trace), whereas in LD, it is filled with a coreferential resumptive pronoun (Birner & Ward, 1998). The role of information structure, especially LD and TOP in the comprehension of reading is undeniable. These structures involve the syntax/discourse interface and thereby their study can provide answers to questions about their impact on comprehension. The present study therefore searches for the