Children's knowledge of structural properties of expository text.

Examined children's knowledge of 3 structural properties of expository text—topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion. 15 children each in Grades 3, 5, and 7 completed a series of paragraph-construction tasks. Nearly all the Ss were able to identify paragraphs in text and to group topically related sentences together to make short texts. Only the 7th-grade Ss were adept at describing what makes a paragraph a paragraph, at excluding topically unrelated sentences from short texts, and at arranging sentences into cohesive wholes. Even the oldest Ss experienced some difficulty in placing main-idea statements in the modal structural position. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)