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.