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Ninth grade good and poor readers completed a cloze passage in which words involved in three kinds of cohesive relationships (referential, conjunctive, and lexical) had been systematically deleted. The subjects were asked to read the passage orally, supply the missing words, and think aloud about the reasons for supplying each cloze deletion. Results indicated that subjects were aware of the cohesive relationships in text and that they generally used these relationships to help them supply the missing cloze items. More importantly, the results indicated that subjects varied their use of intrasentential and intersentential information based upon the type of cohesion involved in the cloze. The results of this study are first discussed in terms of the debate over whether or not cloze is sensitive to intersentential processing and then in terms of the use of cloze as an instructional technique in the classroom.The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between good and poor readers' awareness of the cohesive relationships which exist within a text and which make that text a unified whole rather than a collection of unrelated sentences. Halliday and Hasan (1976, p.4) explain that "the concept of cohesion is a semantic one [which] refers to relations of meaning that exist within a text, and that define it as a text." Cohesion exists when the interpretation of one textual element depends upon the interpretation of another element within the same text. The cohesive relationship is termed a tie and requires the presence of both a referring item and its referent. The cohesive ties described by Halliday and Hasan involve between-sentence cohesion rather than within-sentence cohesion. Intrasentence cohesion is primarily determined by the rules of grammatical structure which hold for sentences; whereas, intersentence cohesion is achieved by cohesive ties which integrate semantic relationships across sentence boundaries.

Abstract. This study was designed to examine the effects of two different discourse types upon the amount and kind of explicit and inferred information in the free and probed recalls of good and poor third grade readers following their reading of a selection with expository/informative tendencies and a selection with narrative/entertaining tendencies. Findings indicated that different text types do influence the amount and kind of information recalled by good and poor readers in that both groups recalled a higher proportion of explicitly stated information, generated more connectors, and were better able to preserve the original order of propositions in the narrative than in the expository selections. Reader ability level also produced some general differences in recall across discourse types in that good readers recalled more explicit information and generated more inferred information than poor readers. Furthermore, good readers' tendency to include most of the explicit information they remembered in their free recalls and to generate inferred information primarily in response to probes indicates that they may possess greater metacognitive awareness and are better able to separate explicit and inferred information. However, within groups the effects were not stable across text type and reader ability level for individual readers who frequently varied considerably in the amount and kind of explicit and inferred information recalled after reading the two types of texts. Thus, it was concluded that it is not possible to reliably predict an individual's recall patterns from one type of text to another due to the potential influence of a variety of specific text and reader characteristics within varying contextual situations.In an attempt to understand the processes involved in comprehending discourse, most past research has centered upon defining the influence of reader, text, and context. For example, many studies of discourse comprehension have dealt with the effects of structural characteristics of text upon a subject's ability to remember text, while other experiments have assessed the effects of context, reader's preexisting

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