Research On Chinese Readability Formula Of Texts For Elementary And Intermediate Korean And Japanese Students

According to the research on readability formulae and the relative reading theories, this thesis developed a formula to evaluate the difficulty of the Chinese texts for Korean and Japanese students who learn Chinese as a foreign language. Also the thesis discussed the relationship between the scores from the formula and teachers' judgment. There were two experiments in this thesis. In the first experiment, the subjects were 90 elementary and intermediate Japanese and Korean students, and the material was 20 cloze tests adapted from 20 narrative passages. Thus the dependent variable was the scores of the students in the cloze tests. Then we calculated 17 variables of the passages, such as the number of the characters, the number of simple characters and the number of the words, etc.. According to the statistical theory, 10 variables were kept as the predictor variables. Then we developed a formula in the field of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. That is:Y = 72.749 - 0.462X₃ + 0.802X₄ - 7.515X₅ + 2.446X₇Y=Reading scoresX₃=Total Number of words, X4=Number of simple words,X₅=Number of function words, X7=Number of clauses.The four variables can account for 80.3% of the total variance, which means in some degree the formula can predict the difficulty of the Chinese narrative reading materials for elementary and intermediate Japanese and Korean students. In the second experiment, 15 Chinese teachers were asked to evaluate the difficulty of 10 narrative texts. The correlation between the teachers' judgment and the reading scores was calculated. The result showed that they were not significantly correlated. In the end, the detailed explanation of the result and the application of the formula were given.