| There has been increased interest by various segments in the academic community in how language users go about learning and producing written discourse. Accompanying this interest is an ever growing school of thought which insists writing should not be seen in isolation from communicative skills in general. Hypotheses formulated about writing are to be closely aligned with current theories of reading. From this perspective, reading and writing are not mirror images, one being the reverse of the other, but rather run in parallel and use the same basic information processing mechanisms.;The analysis of texts produced throughout the semester by writers involved in the curriculum indicated that (1) writers increased their ability to generate more globally coherent texts, (2) control of coherence was not a monolithic ability and varied across tasks for all writers, (3) texts were considered to be high in coherence because they: contained more redundant cues supporting the generation of macrostructures, contained fewer propositions which either required the making of major inferences or were meaningless to the readers, and (4) high text coherence did not result in more shared meanings among readers transacting with the text.;This study explored sociological, psychological, and linguistic interrelationships between text production and text comprehension through (1) the delineation of process universals common to both reading and writing, (2) the incorporation of these universals within a macro theory and model of text production, the theory itself built through using current theories of text comprehension as model analogues, and (3) the development, implementation, and evaluation of a writing-reading curriculum highlighting key transactions within the theory. The construct of global coherence was operationalized as the basis for data analysis and curriculum evaluation. Analysis of coherence was considered in regard to (1) writer growth and development in control of coherence, (2) the key "within-text" differences between texts high and low in coherence, and (3) the effects of text coherence on shared meaning among readers. |
