The Analysis Of The Readability Of Reading Parts In Junior English Textbooks Of PEP

Textbooks are the main basis for teachers to make teaching design and they are also necessary tools for students to acquire knowledge in or out of class.Therefore,it is self-evident that the textbooks are very important.The English Curriculum Standards for compulsory Education points out that the compilation of English textbooks should conform to the principle of scientificity.That is to say,the arrangement of the contents in the textbooks should be gradual and orderly.The measurement of the readability of textbooks can provide a certain reference for editors to better improve the textbooks.It can also help teachers select and use textbooks effectively,so that teachers can flexibly adjust the contents in the textbooks without violating the gradualness to achieve a better teaching effectiveness.The existing researches on the readability of English textbooks mainly focus on the college and higher vocational textbooks.However,there are few researches on the readability of high school English textbooks,especially junior high school English textbooks.Therefore,this study combines the main factors affecting the readability and the Flesch R.E.formula to analyze the readability of reading parts in junior English textbooks of PEP.This study intended to analysis the readability of the reading parts in junior English textbooks of PEP.The textbooks for grade seven were published in 2012 and these for grade eight and grade nine were published in 2013.What’s more,this study analyzes the readability of the reading parts from internal and external evaluation.Internal evaluation is mainly conducted from four aspects: lexical level,syntactic level,topics and the Flesch R.E.formula.Besides,this study includes an interview about the difficulty of the reading materials from 114 junior school students and 16 English teachers to complete the external evaluation.Through internal evaluation and external evaluation,this study intended to explore the following questions:1.What are the readability levels of reading texts in junior English textbooks of PEP?2.Does the readability in the reading texts conform to the scientific principle of gradualness in The English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education both in horizontal(between the units within one book)and vertical(between the books)level?Through the research,some findings can be made:1.The R.E.score of the texts in these five textbooks is a little high,which indicates that the texts are not very difficult for students.2.The difficulty of reading texts varies randomly from one unit to another in each textbook.From the perspective of changes in lexical difficulty,syntactic difficulty,topics and RE scores,the scientific principle of gradualness is not followed.3.The readability of reading texts among the five English textbooks of PEP basically follows the scientific principle of gradualness.But it’s worth noting that the new-word ratio in the texts of these five textbooks is on the decline from grade 7 to grade 9 and the average word-length of reading texts in the textbook of Grade 9 is lower than that of Grade 8.It indicates that the difficulty of vocabularies of the textbooks among these five textbooks can be adjusted properly.The unscientific setting of the readability of reading texts in the same textbook will affect the learning effect of students.Texts which are too difficult will reduce students’ self-confidence and enthusiasm in reading,and texts which are too simple will make students lose interests in reading.Therefore,editors can use the data in this study for reference to optimize the reading texts and to make the readability of the textbooks better conform to the requirement of English curriculum standards and the language learning laws of students.Teachers can also reasonably adjust their arrangement of teaching process based on the data in this study without affecting the gradualness of reading to achieve better teaching results.