The constructed responses individuals generate while reading can provide insights into their coherence-building processes. The current study examined how the cohesion of constructed responses relates to performance on an integrated writing task. Participants (N = 95) completed a multiple document reading task wherein they were prompted to think…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…

An overarching motivation driving my research has been to further our theoretical understanding of how readers successfully comprehend challenging text. This article describes the theoretical origins of this research program and my quest to understand comprehension processes through the use of technology. Coh-Metrix was developed to measure, and…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

The present study examined the complex structural relationships between the factors that influence L2 writing in more and less cognitively demanding tasks. To this end, 298 10th graders were recruited from a local high school in Korea. Participants completed tasks measuring L1 and L2 writing skills, L2 reading comprehension, L2 proficiency, L2…