Readers' Awareness of Cohesive Relationships during Cloze Comprehension

Abstract

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.

The influence of connectives on young readers' processing and comprehension of text.

“…Most studies of children's comprehension of connectives have examined whether or not the presence of a connective in general aids understanding (e.g., (Bridge & Winograd, 1982;Geva & Ryan, 1985). Where performance between connectives that signal different types of coherence relations has been compared, differences are evident.…”

Using Rational Cloze for Diagnostic Testing in L1 and L2 Reading

“…However, first language (Ll) research with junior high good and poor readers (Bridge & Winograd, 1982;Rains, 1981) and mature fluent readers (MacLean, 1982) has indicated that by combining rational doze with introspection one can examine not only how well a reader creates and manipulates meaning while reading, but also what strategies are used to accomplish this.…”

“…Two assessment procedures which have been frequently used by first and second language reading researchers for examining how readers understand text are rational cloze (Bachman, 1982;Bridge & Winograd, 1982;Clarke, 1981;Levenston, Nir, & Blum-Kulka, 1982) and mentalistic approaches such as protocol analysis, retrospection, or introspection (Cohen, 1982;Cohen & Hosenfeld, 1981;Hare & Pulliam, 1980;Olshavsky, 1976-77). These procedures offer insights into text processing while at the same time maintaining the dynamic and interactive nature of the reading act without dissecting it into isolated skills for separate examination.…”

On the Use of Verbal Reports in Reading Research

“…The more explicit subjects make their reports of their processes, the more reliable will be classifications of these processes, since fewer inferences will need to be made by the researchers. To familiarize subjects with the task, researchers have used several types of training procedures, including demonstration tapes (Bridge & Winograd, 1982), practice think-aloud sessions (Kavale & Schreiner, 1979), and pre-study introspection (Johnston & Afflerbach, 1983). Use of such procedures presents a dilemma.…”

“…Researchers interested in studying the cognitive processes involved in reading have recently shown interest in the use of verbal reports to gather data on aspects of the reading process (Bridge & Winograd, 1982;Brown & Day, 1983;Garner, 1982;Johnston & Afflerbach, 1983;Kavale & Schreiner, 1979;Marr, 1983;Olshavsky, 1976-77). This interest is actually a continuation of the long, if sporadic, history of verbal report data in reading research (Huey, 1908;McCallister, 1930;Piekarz, 1954;Strang, 1964Strang, , 1970.…”