Abstract
This article presents the results of a study looking at the relationship between genre awareness and reading comprehension. The study explores how 34 randomly selected students of a university in Indonesia understood the characteristics of 10 texts of 5 different genres and comprehended the texts. The students were required to answer 60 questions testing their knowledge about genres and 80 questions for reading comprehension. The results of the study show that a strong indication of the relationship of these two variables. On average the students’ genre awareness was low as they could only answer about 23% of the questions. Their reading comprehension indicates a similar result. They could answer only about 37% of the questions on average. This conclusion is also affirmed by the fact that the students whose genre awareness was good also had good reading comprehension, and vice versa. Interestingly, some other factors that apparently influence the students’ reading comprehension were also evident. They were background knowledge about the content of the texts and field-related vocabulary.