Cohesion plays an important role in science texts as their comprehension depends much on structural and textual signalling, which demonstrates the organisation of the text, the logical links of ideas, and the intended purpose of the writer. Particularly, research has shown that English learners (ELs) rely more on cohesive markers than their…

Developments in linguistics, particularly in Europe in the work of T.A. Van Dijk, a broader conception of texts that shows promise for the study of reading. Textlinguistics covers a domain of linguistics studies that are involved with texts. Textlinguists are interested not only in those obvious immediate connecting mechanisms, such as anaphora,…

This paper suggests that teachers concentrate on the ideational and structural properties of text rather than on information acquired from readability formulas when selecting and using texts. Emphasis is given to the importance of context in the analysis of text, and a framework is suggested for examining the text considering the functions texts…

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Points out that if relationships between sentences are made implicit (for the sake of simplicity or readability), comprehension may suffer and explains three teaching strategies for improving students' comprehension of implicit connectives. (RL)

This report describes the work of the text analysis groups of the Center for the Study of Reading, whose goals are to investigate the problem of reading comprehension from the standpoint of comparing properties of texts to the difficulty or ease of reading and to construct appropriate theories to account for text properties. The text analysis…

Arguing that discourse coherence can provide a window on the writing processes that produce it, this paper describes developmental differences observed in children's writing and proposes a procedural model to account for those differences. The first section of the paper points out that a developmental model of the writing process should specify…

Two theoretical orientations-schema theory and cultural norms for the use of language unify this multidisciplinary collection of papers examining discourse. Chapters by Adams and Collins; Warren; Nicholas and Trabasso; Stein and Glenn; and Freedle and Hale highlight the application of schema theory to the study of story recall, reading, and the…