Over the past 15 years, research on discourse analysis and language comprehension has increasingly demonstrated that text structure awareness has a strong impact on reading comprehension. Text structture awareness also has important implications for reading instruction with several studies demonstrating improved reading comprehension following instruction on text structure, This article will focus specifically on research which examines how textual coherence and the patterning of textual organization contribute to reading comprehension. The review will also highlight more recent research and practices which use the concept of textual structuring for reading (and writing) instruction.