This study investigates reading comprehension from the discourse point of view. It basically examined discourse knowledge of paragraph structure and the comprehension of academic/expository text. In this regard, it is assumed that it is the interaction between textual competence, including textual cohesion or rhetorical organization, and the text that can lead to discourse comprehension. Results of the study on 155 participants, consisted of two groups in two faculties of the University of Tehran, indicated that in terms of one group, there is a relationship between knowledge of text integration and text comprehension. The findings also revealed that the stage of discourse comprehension requires sufficient knowledge of discourse pattern to enable the readers to use clues for coherence and to focus on markers bringing logical relationship to the comprehension of academic text. However, regarding the results of the other group no significant differences between the experimental group and the control one was observed.
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