Three Linguistic Properties Affecting Text Difficulties

2015

What makes a text readable? Although there are many articles concerned with readability from various perspectives, there have been no recent attempts to consider the field more generally, as an area of scholarly research as well as one that has practical import. This book brings together the relevant literature and theories, and situates them within a unified account. Beginning with an historical treatment of the concept of readability and readability formulas, it goes on to discuss recent research on the subject from the perspectives of many fields, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and text linguistics. The book can serve as a one-stop resource for both scholars and practitioners who seek a single source offering a comprehensive, principled discussion of the issues. It fills a significant gap, since there is no other book on the market that even attempts such a comprehensive treatment of readability. REVIEWS: "Anyone concerned about readability formulas will love this book, for it begins by providing a concise summary of the history of this elusive concept and points out the many past accepted fallacies in the efforts to produce grade and age level correlations of materials for children to read and understand, and then points to a more effective way to discover readability. The authors take this quest in an excitingly new direction. Instead of searching for correlations of material written by adults (an odd thought for studying material for children), they search for the answer in the language properties of texts that can impede fluent reading and, equally important, what kinds of knowledge different readers (including children) need in order to unpack the meaning of the text. The book takes the search beyond the purported complexity of words and sentences to a linguistic analysis of the effects of self-embedded structures, branching of relative clauses, ambiguities of various types, the repetition of coherence, and the important but largely overlooked background knowledge of readers, all of which suggest the need for different definitions of fluency and comprehension than have been hitherto advanced." --Roger W. Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, Georgetown University

1981

Sentences which generated the highest rate of miscues per word per reader were analyzed for aspects which contributed to the high miscue rates. Correlations between miscue rate for all sentences in each of three stories and the Schmidt-Kittel Linguistic Complexity Ratio were also obtained. These correlations for each story were significant but moderate (.27, .23, .38 respectively). # Analysis of the sentences confirmed that syntactic complexity itself was not the only contributor to miscues. These aspects emerged: 1) Lack of I relevant prior context; 2) Unfamiliar or unusual use of terminology; 3) Weak syntax; 4) Unpredictable simple structures;'5) Unusual stylized syntax; * Kitten. Jones **

2015

A R T I C L E S U M M A R Y Content list available at www.urmia.ac.ir/ijltr Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 10.30466/ijltr.2015.20399 2 K. Lotfipour-Saedi/Suggestions toward some ... Introduction Formulating our location in relation to the jargon: Register, Genre, Style, and Discourse analysis Texts we encounter in our everyday life vary from one another in many different respects, for example, poetry, fiction prose, newspaper articles, public speeches, parliamentary question-time talks, courtroom language, classroom talk, academic papers, lab reports, billboards statistics, funeral eulogies, sermons, wedding ceremony, personal letters, business letters, degree award ceremonies, family dinner table conversation, and many others. These varieties come about thanks to variations in the choices from both lexico-grammar and para-language. But despite sharing the same resources, the variations fall under different perspectives of register, genre and style. Adopting an SFG (S...

Palgrave Macmillan (Publisher), 2016

What makes a text readable? Although there are many studies concerned with readability from various perspectives, there have been no recent attempts to consider the field more generally, as an area of scholarly research as well as one that has practical significance. This book brings together the relevant literature and theories, and situates them within a unified account. Beginning with an historical treatment of the concept of readability and readability formulas, it goes on to discuss recent research on the subject from the perspectives of many fields, including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and text linguistics. The book will be invaluable to both scholars and practitioners who seek a single resource offering a comprehensive, principled discussion of the issues. "Anyone concerned about readability formulas will love this book, for it begins by providing a concise summary of the history of this elusive concept and points out the many past accepted fallacies in the efforts to produce grade and age level correlations of materials for children to read and understand, and then points to a more effective way to discover readability. The authors take this quest in an excitingly new direction. Instead of searching for correlations of material written by adults (an odd thought for studying material for children), they search for the answer in the language properties of texts that can impede fluent reading and, equally important, what kinds of knowledge different readers (including children) need in order to unpack the meaning of the text. The book takes the search beyond the purported complexity of words and sentences to a linguistic analysis of the effects of self-embedded structures, branching of relative clauses, ambiguities of various types, the repetition of coherence, and the important but largely overlooked background knowledge of readers, all of which suggest the need for different definitions of fluency and comprehension than have been hitherto advanced." --Roger W. Shuy, Distinguished Research Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, Georgetown University, USA

This paper explores the problem of reconciling general psychological processing constraints with linguistic constraints on discourse structure. Two types of psychological constraints, the 'immediacy constraint' and the 'limited focusing constraint.' are shown to combine with linguistic constraints to determine the pattern of eye movements during reading in two case studies. Data suggest that (1) there is a role for both immediacy and limited focusing in parsing, and (2) le:gical priming was evident, but could not account for subtler effects of contextual restriction that only appear when processing definite noun-phrases. Psychological and linguistic determinates of processing may interact in much more complicated ways than has been assumed. (Author/JP)

2014

As teachers, we typically have experience-based intuitions about whether the reading difficulty of a text is appropriate for our students. It can, however, be challenging to pinpoint sources of difficulty. In this article, I describe a process for identifying one common challenge in reading and offer suggestions for teachers to deal with it. We begin, in the next paragraph, with a 'thought experiment.'

This paper examines discourse factors as sources of difficulty in texts for beginning readers. The least readable portions of three primer and trade texts were identified through miscue data from nine beginning readers. Analysis of children's miscues and retellings showed patterns of difficulty related to (a) connective devices, (b) narrative voice, (c) patterned repetition, and (d) the role of pictures. Results suggested that beginning readers were more successful when text met their expectations about the use of connective and rhetorical devices and when patterned repetition and pictures were related to discourse structure. This study challenges conventional notions of readability and indicates the need for a broader consideration of text characteristics which support learning to read. Although primer stories in basal reading programs are intended to be easy for children to read, text construction and evaluation are generally governed by conventional notions of readability based on sentence length and word length, frequency, and difficulty. The result is often short texts composed of short sentences with short, high-frequency words that may also follow regular phonics rules (Durkin, 1983; Rhodes, 1979). Several studies (e.g., Garman, 1977; Lutz, 1974) have shown that the language of these primer texts is far less complex than the language children at this age spontaneously use in conversation and dictation of experience stories. Moreover, the language of primer texts is not just overly simple, it is deviant. In the effort to simplify texts to meet conventional readability criteria, publishers frequently violate higher-order principles for structuring 169

2001

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess both text comprehension and processing time of authentic texts and these same texts simplified to beginning and intermediate levels. Forty-eight second language learners each read 9 texts (3 different authentic, beginning, and intermediate level texts). Repeated measures ANOVAs reported linear effects of text type on reading time (normalized for text length) and true/false comprehension scores indicating that beginning level texts were processed faster and were more comprehensible than intermediate level and authentic texts. The linear effect of text type on comprehension remained significant within an ANCOVA controlling for language proficiency (i.e., TOEFL scores), reading proficiency (i.e., Gates-MacGinitie scores), and background knowledge, but not for reading time. Implications of these findings for materials design, reading pedagogy, and text processing and comprehension are discussed.

This paper focuses on pupils´ text comprehension as viewed through the perspective of text readability. Reading comprehension is a topic which is anchored in three disciplines: didactics, linguistics, and the theory of learning from text. Each of these disciplines contributes to the topic in a specific way. However, all of them aim at exploring the characteristics and processes needed by the reader in text comprehension.