This study investigated the effects of an instructional procedure which incorporated lexical cohesion and macrorules to promote main idea comprehension of Thai EFL students. One hundred and six undergraduate students taking a reading module were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions: the combined use of lexical cohesion and…

College students wrote summaries of short passages to assess their ability to identify important information. Naive summaries judged as "better" contained more major semantic roles, such as agent, than did summaries judged "not as good". Students wrote better summaries when instructed to use major semantic roles within the passage. (Author/RD)