Abstract: Both syntactic knowledge and discourse knowledge affect reading comprehension. This paper reviews previous studies on syntactic knowledge, discourse knowledge and reading competence development of EFL learners. After analysing the contributions and limitations of previous research, the authors claim that it is necessary to probe the correlations among the two factors and their relative effects on EFL learners’ reading competence, so as to further explore the cognitive processes of reading comprehension and to provide references for the learning and teaching of reading