A Comparative Study On Text Difficulty Of The Reading Texts In The New And Old Editions Of High School English Textbooks By Yilin Press

In senior high school English classroom,reading text in the book is not only an important source for students to obtain language knowledge,but also an important way for teachers to cultivate students’ reading skills and develop students’ reading ability.Therefore,the reading text of teaching materials is particularly important in senior high school English teaching.To meet the requirements of the college entrance examination curriculum reform and 2017 new edition of English Curriculum Criteria for Regular High School,the new edition of Yilin Senior High School textbooks was published and put into use in 2020.This thesis aims to use the specific instrument to do some research on the two editions of Yilin Senior High School textbooks(2010 edition and 2020 edition)in different aspects.It seeks to answer the following questions:1)What are the overall text difficulty of reading texts in each edition(2010 edition and 2020 edition)of Senior High English textbooks published by Yilin Press in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability?2)What are the evolving features of the text difficulty of the reading texts in each edition in terms of the above mentioned four aspects?3)How do the text difficulty of the reading texts in the two editions(2010 edition and 2020 edition)of senior high English textbooks differ in terms of the above mentioned four aspects?The research materials for this thesis are the reading texts(five compulsory books,30 reading texts)in the old edition(2010 edition)Senior High English textbooks and the reading texts(three compulsory books,24 reading texts)in the new edition(2020edition)Senior High English textbooks by Yilin Press.Coh-Metrix 3.0 is used to investigate the questions.72 indices under nine modules are selected to measure the text difficulty of the textbooks,which could comprehensively and objectively predict text difficulty.The research results are presented below:1)It is found that there are variations under each index in the five textbooks of2010 edition.The highest variations lie in lexical complexity and syntactic complexity.For lexical complexity of the five 2010 edition textbooks,it shows great variation in noun incidence,pronoun incidence and age of acquisition for content words.For syntactic complexity of the five 2010 edition textbooks,the high variation lies in noun phrase density and verb phrase density.There also exit variations under each index in the three textbooks of 2020 edition.The highest variations also lie in lexical complexity and syntactic complexity.For lexical complexity,it shows the great variation in noun incidence,pronoun incidence,first person plural pronoun incidence,age of acquisition for content words,and concreteness for content word.For syntactic complexity,the high variation lies in noun phrase density and verb phrase density.2)For the five compulsory English textbooks of 2010 edition,there are great changes in text difficulty.(1)In terms of lexical complexity,Book Two is higher than the other four books in type-token ratio for content word and type-token ratio for all words.The word frequency for content words and familiarity for content words in Book One and Book Five are higher than those in the other three books.(2)In terms of syntactic complexity,Book Two contains more noun phrases;Book Five contains more verb phrases;Book Four and Book Five contain more verb infinitives.(3)In terms of cohesion and coherence,Book One and Book Five are higher than the rest three books.(4)The readability of Book One is the highest and that of Book Five is the lowest;the readability of Book Three is higher than that of Book Two and Book Four.The three 2020 edition compulsory textbooks by Yilin Press are consistent in text difficulty.It shows consistency in three aspects: lexical complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability.The significant difference lies in syntactic complexity:Book One is higher than Book Two and Book Three in verb phrase density;Book Three is higher than Book One and Book Two in preposition phrase density.3)There are many inconsistencies in text difficulty between the 2010 edition Yilin textbooks and the 2020 edition Yilin textbooks.Lexical complexity of the textbooks of 2020 edition is higher than that of the textbooks of 2010 edition.In terms of syntactic complexity,the two edition textbooks hold similarity to a large extent.The cohesion and coherence of 2020 edition textbooks are lower than those of 2010 edition textbooks,which means that the text difficulty of 2020 edition textbooks is higher and requires students to have a higher discourse reading ability.Readability of textbooks of2020 edition is comparatively lower than that of 2010 edition,meaning that the text difficulty of 2020 edition textbooks is higher.In summary,the five compulsory books of 2010 edition show inconsistency in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,cohesion and coherence,and readability whereas the three compulsory books of 2020 edition show great consistency in three aspects;text difficulty of textbooks of 2020 edition is higher than that of textbooks of 2010 edition.