Text difficulty vs text readability: Students� voices

Abstract

Reading is an essential skill to be mastered, especially by university students and it is the lecturers� responsibility to train their students to develop their reading skill. In order to do so, lecturers will have to develop materials or choose materials from existing books to be used in the teaching learning process. The text difficulty must be appropriate to the students� English proficiency level. This study was aimed at finding the students� perceptions of the difficulty of the texts used in the reading class and the corresponding text readability. This study utilized the survey design and the content analysis involving 141 second semester students of the English Language Education Department of a state university. Questionnaires were used to get data on students� perceptions of the text difficulty and the text readability was analysed with the help of https://readabilityformulas.com. The data on students� perceptions were analysed using percentage while the data on the text readability were analysed using the readability test. The findings showed that there was a difference in the students� perception of the difficulty of the text and the readability level as being calculated using different readability formulas.�

Text readability: its impact on reading comprehension and reading time

“…Given the possibility that text readability has an impact on comprehension, it is difficult to accept that studies of text readability in the EFL context are extremely scarce. Several studies have been conducted focusing on matching the readability level of reading materials to the language proficiency levels of intended readers [26]- [28], text readability and readers' perceived readability [29], and the interaction between text readability and the level of task difficulty [22]. We found only one study, which was slightly related to the aim of this study, but the study was more focused on assessing the relationship between students' challenge in understanding inference text-based questions and the readability of the reading text [30].…”

Bayes model for assessing the reading difficulty of English text for English education in Jordan

“…Technically, the reading difficulty level is concerned with the problem of matching between a reader and an appropriate text. As described in [11], [12], the difficulty level of a given text that readers can understand is (in some measure) determined by the reader's vocabulary knowledge. The reading difficulty level or readability assessment is the process for predicting the reading grade level required from an input text or document that corresponds to the reader to understand written materials [13].…”