The study examined the use of expository text structure as a reading and writing strategy with 15 learning-disabled adolescents, 15 normally achieving adolescents, and 15 normally achieving fourth graders. Two reading tasks required students to recognize sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. The third task required students to write endings to partially written paragraphs representing sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. It was hypothesized that learning-disabled adolescents would perform similarly to fourth graders, but poorer than their normally achieving peers. All groups demonstrated sensitivity to text inconsistencies during reading, were better able to identify inconsistent sentences embedded in sequence text than in comparison-contrast text, and experienced greater difficulty answering questions for inconsistent than consistent comparison-contrast text. However, learning-disabled adolescents performed less well than their peers and similarly to fourth graders in their use of text structure during writing. The lack of many significant correlations among variables for any group suggests the need for research which systematically investigates strategy use across a variety of texts and tasks. (DB)