Readers as Writers Composing From Sources

IN discourse synthesis readers become writers, creating new texts by selecting, organizing, and connecting content from source texts. In this study of discourse synthesis, accomplished and less accomplished readers in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades in U.S. schools were given a report-writing task. Over a 3-day period in their English/language arts classes, the 60 students in the study wrote informational reports composed of content they selected from three source texts (encyclopedia articles on a single topic) as well as content they added. Text analyses showed differences associated with both reading ability and grade level in how students selected content from the sources and provided connections between ideas in their reports. In addition, differences associated only with reading ability were apparent in students' organization of the content. Differences between readers were manifested on measures of task management as well as on features of the texts they produced: The accomplished readers developed more elaborate written plans and spent more time on the task. The authors conclude that general reading ability and success at synthesizing overlap to a great extent, and suggest that success at synthesis may be related to cognitive factors commonly associated with comprehension, such as sensitivity to text structure.