Corpus-Based Study on Readability of Integrated English Textbooks

Tunan HU

Abstract


Readability has been used extensively as a quantitative indicator to evaluate the difficulty of reading textbooks. Based on a corpus consisting of 96 texts from two versions of integrated English textbooks published by the top-tier publishing house in China in 2013 and 2020 respectively, this paper employs three readability formulas (i.e. FRE, FKGL and LR) to examine their readability trends and differences in readability. The results show that: 1) the readability of both book sets is moderate, corresponding to the reading level of 8th-9th grade students in the US, 2) no significant differences are found in three readability indices between two book sets, 3) some of LR subindices, such as deep cohesion, show an opposite tendency to the change of overall readability. It is claimed that: 1) both book sets are difficult for the students in the corresponding grades to read and have a scientific hierarchy of readability; 2) the upgrade does not mean that reading difficulty should increase limitlessly; 3) some subindices can be tapped into purposefully to moderate the overall read difficulty. This study tries to provide a quantitative approach to evaluate English textbooks in terms of readability.


Keywords


Corpus-based; Readability assessment; Integrated English textbooks

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12876

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