Readability Index and Reading Complexity in high school EFL ‎Textbooks

Document Type : research article

Author

Assistant Professor of English at Qazvin International University, Buin Zahra Center for Higher Technical and Engineering Education, Qazvin, Iran

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the readability of Iranian English ‎textbooks, Vision series 1-3, for high school. It focused on the reading ‎sections of student books and workbooks. The texts were collected and ‎fed into different readability tools such as Coh-metrix, and Flasch-‎Kincaid. The purpose was to evaluate the texts in terms of lexical and ‎syntactic complexity as well as cohesion which included narrativity, ‎syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion and deep ‎cohesion. Each factor was able to increase or decrease the load of ‎cohesion in the text. in addition, the output analysis managed to generally ‎determine how difficult the passages were and what grade levels they ‎suited. The findings revealed that there was some mismatch between the ‎standard CEFR and NGSL wordlists and the number of words the ‎learners study during their formal school language learning. Besides, the ‎texts of the workbooks were to varying degrees incompatible with each ‎other. Detailed examination uncovered some more features of each single ‎text. Assessing the Iranian textbooks may be generalized to assist the ‎international community such as teachers, material developers, and ‎writers determine what might present difficulties to language learners and ‎then take actions to improve their reading and writing skills .‎

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References

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Journal of Foreign Language Research
Volume 12, Issue 2
September 2022
Pages 37-59

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