Research On The Readability Of Tibetan Textbooks

Readability refers to the degree or property for texts whether they are easy to be read and understood by readers. Readability research has a long history, which research results have been widely used in teaching, book publishing and network media. At present, the research of read-ability is mainly focused on two points:the factors of readability and the design of readability function.Firstly, the effects on readability factors of the Tibetan textbooks were studied. Based on the analysis of the factors of readability by the formers and combined with the status of Tibetan information processing technology, I analysed the factors impacting the readability of Tibetan textbooks from three aspects (vocabulary, sentence, discourse), including the number of words, different words, new words, word length, sentence length, the number of sentences, Human touch index and named entity, and carried on the statistical analysis for each factor. Statistical results show that number of words, different words, word length, sentence length, the number of sentences, Human touch index and named entity are increased with grade increased. But new words are decreased with grade increaed. On the other hand, it can be found that the number of personal name is more than place name which is more than organization name from the analysis of named entity. What’s more, seeing from the source of the entity, the number of native entity (e.g. Zahi) is more than the foreign translation entity (e.g. Edison), and the foreign translation entity is more than the domestic translation entity (e.g. Sima Guang).The evaluation formulas for the Tibetan textbooks are also studied in this paper. First of all,I choosed five classic redability formulas (FRE, GFI, ARI, FK, SMOG) to assess the readability of Tibetan textbooks and analysed the correlation between the five formulas which showed high correlation. Then the linear regression model analysis technology is used to study the eight factors. Finally two formulas suitting for assessing the readability of Tibetan textbooks are constructed. The experimental results tested by new formula 1 show that named entity, word length and the number of sentences can better reflect the readabilty of Tibetan textbooks. The assessing effect is still good tested by formula 2 with only one factor. And the results tested by two new formulas get good consistency compared with classic formulas. Namely, the readability is lower and lower with the higher grade, which is in accord with adolescent’s cognitive rules. This also means that the new formulas can actually reflect the readability of Tibetan textbooks in some extent and have certain practical assessing value.