We administered measures of learning after reading high and low cohesion texts (defined by repetition of nouns and phrases) to 60 students (31 boys, 29 girls) and measured cognitive ability, facets of conscientiousness, and science self-efficacy.
This radically reconceptualises Halliday & Hasan's (1976) notion of a 'cohesive tie' and what might count as an analysis of cohesion in text (cf. the sample text analyses in Halliday & Hasan 1976: 340 355).
Coh-Metrix is a "web-based software tool" developed to "analyze texts on multiple characteristics" (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011, p. 224) and "to measure cohesion and text difficulty at various levels of language, discourse, and conceptual analysis" (Crossley, Dufty, McCarthy, & McNamara, 2007).
So a central concern for me was reinterpreting cohesive ties as discourse semantic structures and the systems behind them as discourse semantic systems – a project precipitated by Hasan's work on componential and organic cohesion, cohesive harmony and text structure (e.g. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Halliday & Hasan 1980).
So I was analysing cohesion in texts from 1968, at a time when discourse analysis in linguistics was still in its infancy; and while I loved grammar, analysis of textual relations beyond the sentence became my chief concern.
For example, Items 17 and 33 seem to primarily assess textual or discourse knowledge that includes cohesion of texts and rhetorical organization (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, 2010; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996).
Properly accounting for text cohesion phenomena is a prerequisite for the soundness and validity of the generated text representation structures.
This pattern was repeated for text cohesion.
