Investigates and demonstrates the strong effects of the role of global discourse organization on the comprehension of temporal order in narrative texts. Proposes three principles of discourse organization. Tests the comprehension of underlying event order of five passages by subjects. (HB)

Indicates a facilitation in undergraduate students' reading time for congruent text marking for both cohesion and textual structure that manifested itself at different points in the sentence. Suggests that readers are highly sensitive to coherence marking devices, and strictly local coherence models cannot completely account for what readers are…

Investigates fifth-grade children's expectations for stories in relation to knowledge of literature/reading ability. Shows "high readers" included more high-level story propositions and structurally important story information than did low readers; students who included structurally important story information scored higher on knowledge…

Investigates children's peer group discussions of a storybook, an information book, and an informational storybook. Finds older students collaborating more, drawing more on peer information, participating in longer discussions, and making more confirming and challenging responses than younger children. Finds that children stayed on topic longer…

Written for researchers and graduate students, this book--a collection of essays by cognitive scientists, socio- and psycholinguists, and English, reading, and language arts educators--explores theoretical and research questions associated with the relationships among oral and written language, listening and reading, and speaking and writing. The…

Investigates the usefulness of using grammatical cohesion to evaluate the macro- or discourse-level, and the micro-level reading comprehension of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) students. Finds a relationship between anaphora and coherence that contributes to reading difficulty. (MG)