A Computer-Assisted Readability Study

Readability is how easily written materials can be read and understood. Readability depends on many factors, including (a) the average length of sentences in a passage, (b) the number of new words a passage contains, (c) the grammatical complexity of the language used, etc. Readability study is of great significance to language teaching, especially to suitability of materials for students.The thesis is a computer-assisted applied study concerning readability. The focus of the study is on the development of measurement software and on the assessment of readability for 3 sets of prevailing textbooks with the measurement software. The purpose of the study is to promote readability study in China with the assistance of computers and English language teaching in China. Some substantial findings for the study are of great value to English textbook compilation and English language teaching. Particularly, the readability measurement software will be a convenient tool for readability study.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the present study, in which the definitions of readability, the importance and necessity, the purpose and motivation are briefly discussed. Chapter Two is readability study in retrospect. This chapter covers the development of readability study: factors affecting readability, readability formulas, subjective judgment, question and answer technique, sentence completion and close procedure, and approaches based on psycholinguistics. Chapter Three gives a brief survey of computer-assisted readability study at home and abroad. On this basis, a general scheme about the software is put forward. Chapter Four is devoted to linguistic preparation for software writing in five aspects: sentence counts, word counts, syllable counts, lexical density and word bank. Chapter Five deals with how to use the readability measurement software and actual application with the measurement software for assessing 3 sets of college English textbooks. Findings are compilers of these 3 sets of textbooks do not attach enough importance to readability. Consequently, a suggestion has been given that the general compiler of each set of textbooks should come up with a general scheme of each set of textbook just before commencing to author the textbooks. Chapter Six sums up the achievements of the whole research and limitations, and presents some issues for further study.