A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On The Text Readability Of Junior Middle School English Textbooks

Textbooks play an important role in English teaching.Reading texts are the main part of the textbook and are crucial for the teaching process.Based on corpus,this study compares the readability of reading text in various versions of junior high school English textbooks to better understand the differences of textbooks.At the same time,this study investigates whether the textbook of each grade follows the law from easy to difficult.The objective of this study is to help the teachers to use the textbooks more flexibly and to provide some reference of quantitative standard of readability for textbook writers.The study selects eight editions of junior high school English textbooks which are widely used in China currently to investigate the differences of text readability from the perspectives of the average word length,new word rate,the average sentence length,and compound sentence frequency.Three different text readability determination formulas(Flesch,SMOG,and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level)are utilized to calculate the difficulty indexes of different versions of the textbooks.Statistical analysis is carried by using SPSS to check the differences among different editions of the textbooks and to explore the trend of text difficulty among different grades.The results show that:(1)There are significant difference in the readability of the eighth editions,among which the most difficult textbooks are: Ren Ai edition,Wai Yan edition,and Lu Jiao edition.The average word length and new word rate in Ren Ai edition are the highest,while the average sentence length and compound sentence frequency in Lu Jiao edition are the highest;(2)There is no increasing trend in terms of text readability for the following editions: Ren Jiao edition,Bei Shi Da edition,Wai Yan edition and Hu Jiao edition.The difficulty of the seventh grade of Ren Jiao edition and Bei Shi Da edition is lower than average,and it shows an overlarge difficulty span from the seventh grade to the eighth.The seventh grade of Wai Yan edition is difficult for students,and the increasing trend among different grades is not obvious.It also presents an overlarge difficulty span from the seventh grade to the eighth of Hu Jiao edition,and the readability of the ninth grade is lower than that of the eighth.Based on the results,this study presents the following suggestions and advices for the textbook writers,teachers and students.Textbook writers should pay attention to the cohesion of text difficulty among different grades;Teachers can choose textbooks reasonably according to regional differences by referring to the readability indexes in this study.Teachers and students can also choose other textbooks as extra-curricular supplements according to the difficulty of different texts.