Reading comprehension can be analyzed from three points of view: Semantics, Assessment, and Cognition. Here, Semantics refers to the task of identifying discourse relations in text. Assessment involves utilizing these relations to obtain meaningful question-answer pairs. Cognition means categorizing questions according to their difficulty or…

A study investigated whether or not the global structure of a text influences its readability and how that influence might be related to the already recognized influences of vocabulary and sentence length. The subjects, 250 fourth-grade students in Quebec, each read four texts representing four different structures, four subjects, and two levels…

Second, fourth, and sixth graders were given passage of text whose material could be represented as four-level class inclusion hierarchy. Students were asked to construct external representation of passage and answer questions that required them to reason about contents of passage. Quality of representation and performance on question tasks were…

A study aimed to discover a correspondence between the thinking processes and textual structures of six eleventh graders. In a predominantly White, middle class rural high school, six students were selected to think aloud as they read two essays written as part of two assignments for their advanced English classes. The six were selected based on…