A Readability Study Of English Texts Based On Coherence And Genre

Readability is an important conception in applied linguistics and its application is of certain value in tests on reading and textbooks for reading. As for the text readability, most previous studies focused on the invention of readability formulas. Many readability formulas have been proposed and are being widely used by people. However, with the development of cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, text processing, ect, text coherence level was found to be an important factor to reader's comprehension problems, and readers also show preference for text genre in the reading process. Traditional metrics do not address potential comprehension problems caused by differences in genre, nor do they address levels of cohesion in text.In this paper, computational tool Coh-Metrix was used to assess both textual coherence and genre in quantitative way based on the results of the previous researchers. Coherence and genre are proved to be the influencing factors in assessment of text reading difficulty, and a new readability measurement including text coherence and genre is explored. The result shows that:(1) Coherence produces obvious variance in different coherence distribution in the beginning, middle, and ending parts with text organization of science and argumentation texts, and demonstrates variance between genres of science, expository, and argumentation.(2) Correlation is manifested between reading facility score and coherence, and the subjects are inclined to get higher score in texts with higher coherence level; there is reading facility score variance among genres, and the subject get the highest reading facility score with expository texts.(3) Predictive equations for a new readability measurement are established based on traditional readability formula and coherence indices with the consideration of genre.These findings have great pedagogical implication for English teaching and reading material selection. The teacher should put emphasis on the notion of coherence, which exists on the levels of words, sentences, paragraphs, topic and contents; prepare students with a good understanding of genre theory, the knowledge of different organizational structure and discourse model in genre provides important guidance for the students. Meanwhile, the present study is also of benefit to reading material selection.