A Study On The Difficulty Of Language In High School History Textbook

Difficulty of the textbook attaches great important to the difficulty of the course, while the proper difficulty of the textbook is the basis of effective teaching. History textbook is the textbook compiled with most characters except for Language textbook. Therefore, it is important for the compilation of history textbooks to study on its difficulty from the angle of linguistics. This paper aims to work out the factors which influence the difficulty of the language of history textbooks on the basis of the current methodology of readability on text and the characters of high school history textbooks. At last, it puts forword some varibilities to test the difficulty from the prospective of Characters, Words and Sentences, which are Level-1characters, Level-2characters, Level-3characters, the uncommon words every hundred characters, the high frequency words related to the text and the average length of the sentences.Besed on the method of stratified sampling, this paper has built a fifty thousand-word corpus about36texts from the history of politics, economics and culture in the four versions of common-used history textbooks in China, and studied on the moderate region of the text with different theme on the aspects of Characters, Words, Sentences and Comprehensive difficulty factors, which suggests that the moderate region of Characters is that there are2～4difficult characters per thousand characters, the one of vocabulary is that there are2～3uncommon used words, and the one of sentences is that the average length of the sentence should include20～40characters. Meanwhile, this paper also confirmed on this hypothesis through the method of questionnaires on high-school students in different schools, which suggest that words and sentences are the main factors which influence the difficulty of the history textbook. And the data points out that the Yuelu-version is the most difficult textbook in language, Renmin-version is the less one, the versions of Beijing Normal University and Renmin Education are proper for high school students.At last, the paper finds out the reasons which results in the difficulties from the angles of the compilers, teachers, students, the texts and dialects. And based on the analysis on them, it proposes some advices to compilers and the users of the textbook for better using of the textbooks.