Readability of English language textbooks for diploma students of the University of Cape Coast

Abstract

Textbooks are important for teaching and learning at every level of education. Being one source of learning materials from which students can read on their own, with the goal of further understanding what has been discussed in class, it is important that these textbooks are written in a way that would be understandable to students. Yet, a number of researches have concluded that textbooks are usually difficult to read by the intended audience. Therefore, this paper examined the readability of English Language textbooks for diploma students of the Centre for Distance Learning, University of Cape Coast. Three textbooks (for year one -three diploma students) were used for the study. Passages were selected from each textbook for readability analyses. Flesch reading ease (FRE) and Flesch -Kincaid grade level (FKGL) indexes were used to compute readability scores of the textbooks. Measures of central tendencies, one-sample T-test, with bootstrapping, were used to analyse the data. The results revealed that the three textbooks were generally between 'fairly difficult' and 'difficult' to read ranges (M = 40.69 and 52.73). The readability of the textbooks was found to be statistically different from recommended readability scores for public documents. Further, the results indicated that the average word per sentence was to be between 22 and 25 for all three textbooks. This may have contributed to the low readability of the textbooks. The researcher recommends the revision of the textbooks, so that they will serve the intended purpose and contribute to effective teaching and learning of English Language.

Breaking Down Barriers to Science Education: Evaluating the Readability of Science Textbooks for second-grade Secondary Students in Jordan

“…The introductory physics and chemistry textbooks for the secondary school system in Africa are frustrating, like in Jordan, as employed from the cloze test results (Ani et al, 2021;Nunoo et al, 2021;Omebe, 2015). Furthermore, the intended students were frustrated by physics, biology, chemistry, and other science subjects (Gyasi & Slippe, 2019;Hakim et al, 2021;Sari, 2020). The students consider physics difficult as it is more comprehensive than chemistry, which contains chemical reactions (Yong, 2010).…”

“…If you want to know how easy or difficult a piece of writing is for the average person to understand, look no further than the text's readability (Bozkurt, 2020;Gül, 2021;Gül & Kargin, 2021). For this reason, readability is an important property in reading instruction (Bozkurt, 2020;Öksüz & Keskin, 2022) as "the degree to which a student at a given level can read and understand a text"), as children and young adults cannot read all texts and, even if they do, may not be able to accomplish the goals expected of them (Gyasi & Slippe, 2019;Sultan et al, 2020). Exam difficulty is determined by readability, which considers factors like sentence and word lengths and the number of new termsevaluation of textual complexity to select choices (Davis & Walters, 2011;Gaulé, 2009;Hill, 2013).…”

“…Font, font size, spacing, and layout; reader factors like prior knowledge, reading ability, interest, and motivation; vocabulary difficulty; text structure; text coherence and cohesion; and syntax are just some of the factors that affect readability (Gyasi & Slippe, 2019;Hidayatillah & Zainil, 2020;Omer & Al-Khaza'leh, 2021). Many believe highachieving pupils read more easily than low-achieving students (Sherafati & Ghafournia, 2019).…”

“…Textbooks are the primary tools in the teaching-learning process, and these are not just an educational aid for the student but a fundamental pillar in the educational process (Tárraga-Mínguez et al, 2021). Textbooks are regarded as the most valuable curriculum component, despite the technological development and deployment of more sophisticated sources of information Bansiong, 2019;Gyasi & Slippe, 2019).…”

Applied Arabic Textbook Readability Level for University Students at Al-Balqa Applied University

“…In light of the pivotal role of language in learning other subjects; the main challenge facing curriculum developers of university courses lies in the techniques used in selecting the reading texts to match students' individual differences and conform to their abilities and intelligence level (Kodom & Pearl, 2019). Moreover, when accurately implemented, readability in language is related to understanding part of the written text, and the efficiency by which the reader can understand a text measured by time of reading, the amount of reading recalled, and questions answered, in addition to some other quantifiable measures of the reader's ability to process text (Sholihah, 2018).…”