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.