Reading teachers of the 1980s need to be confident not only about the key issues but also about their own knowledge of the issues when making decisions. Two issues from the seventies (reading as a developmental process and reading as a psycholinguistic process) combine with the broad notion of textlinguistics as important areas of knowledge for teachers. As childrens' ease in dealing with text increases, the textual components in reading (the internal structure of the sentence, cohesion, and the text's macrostructure or genre) will increase, as will the number and complexity of texts. Some investigations into these textlinguistic features are being undertaken, and one experiment that examines the effect of replacing words deleted from texts is particularly relevant. The method chosen to detect the ability of 96 15-year-old students to perceive cohesion was to alter the text so that one end of a cohesive tie was deleted. Deletions were made according to four main groups of cohesive ties--reference, substitution, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Two-hundred sixty deletions were made throughout the three booklets used. Results showed that when one end of a cohesive tie was removed, the children's ability to restore it relied mainly on two sources of information--structure (from the sentence) and the cohesion present in that part of the text. From knowledge bases such as these, teachers might be helped to encourage their colleagues to support the teaching of reading along the reading development continuum in secondary schools. (HOD)