| Summary: | The main purpose of this study isto examine the effect of local and global text cohesion on improving the reading comprehension of students with low and high prior knowledge. The subjects with high prior knowledge consist of 80 senior high school students(61 females, 19 males),and the subjects with low prior knowledge are 80 senior high school students(70 females.10 males), who are randomly selected using multistage sampling method. Participants with high and low prior knowledge are randomly assigned into four groups. The reading materials of the group members consist of texts with low local and high global cohesion, high local and low global cohesion, low local and high global cohesion, and high local and global cohesion. The research instruments are:1)experimental text,2)comprehension test, and 3)prior knowledge test. The subjects should read the text and then answer the questions of reading comprehension test. The collected data are statistically analyzed. The results show that there is interaction between local and global text cohesion and the reader’s prior knowledge. High local and global cohesion text significantly improved comprehension, compared to the low local and global cohesion text. It is also found that readers who know little about the domain of the text benefit more from text with high local and global cohesion, whereas high-knowledge readers benefit from a minimally coherent text
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