The second phase involved four texts of increasing difficulty and the reading comprehension questions devised to test the learner's ability in using the text structure, cohesion devices, and background knowledge to extract meaning.
High cognitive ability was associated with good performance with both texts, whereas low cognitive ability was associated with poor performance on low cohesion text.
Students achieved better learning from high cohesion text.
Low dutifulness (conscientiousness facet) was associated with poor performance on low cohesion text.
But it still shows more clearly than many longer and better preserved texts the essential cohesion of the several aspects of esoteric Daoism: hagiography, recitation of scriptures, and visionary meditation, all of which are here given additional temporal unity by the messianic context.
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 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.
