"Seeing" structure in text: 11th graders' perception of relationship in essay writing

The purpose of the study was to investigate differences in writers' abilities to perceive global text organisation in self-, peer- and teacher/researcher-authored essays. Eight student participants were identified as proficient, middle or developing, based on the levels of paragraph subordination, the average number of T-Units and the number of words in an initially written essay. Participants read aloud 10 essays written by themselves, by their peers and by the teacher/researcher. A comparison of their reading protocols showed that more proficient student writers used a greater variety of reading strategies, commented more frequently on global relationships across the essay and were more likely to discern and align global and local relationships within the text. These findings suggest that the students' ability to "see" the global organisation of an essay is closely associated with their use of multiple reading strategies. The importance of teaching reading strategies to improve writing is discussed.