A Study Of The Adaptability Of Readability Formulas For English Teaching And Learning In China

Readability is the difficulty level of a text for reading and understanding. After ageneral survey of the readability study, we may find that the readability of a readingtext is mainly assessed by the scores got from readability formulas. Readabilityformulas, as one of the outstanding achievements of readability study, originatedfrom English teaching in the western countries. Readability formulas aremathematical formulas which are used to assess the difficulty of reading materials bycomposing the factors that may affect reading. Here, the factors are mainly textfactors. The readability formulas mainly use the lexical density and syntacticalcomplexity to asses the difficulty of reading materials; the former is determined bythe word frequency or average characters per word while the later is determined bythe average sentence length. Take the Flesch Reading Ease Formula for example. Ituses syllables and average sentence length in a100-word text to test the difficulty andreading level. Using the English texts as the study data, the scholars and researchersin the western countries create the readability formulas. The formulas are used widelyin English countries.The readability study becomes more and more popular in China in recent years,and the formulas are borrowed directly to test the texts. However, there is norelationship between the number of syllables and the difficulty of reading texts inChinese. The performances between the English learners in China and native Englishreaders are quite different as we live in different cultures. Therefore, the authorwonders if this readability formula is suitable for Chinese English learners and if itcan be helpful for Chinese English teachers to make decisions on choosing properreading materials for their students. She also wants to know if there are some otherfactors working in the reading process of Chinese English learners. On the other hand,the input hypothesis suggested by Krashen shows that a language learner learns most only when he understands language that contains structure that is “a little beyond”where he is now. At these points, this thesis aims at checking the adaptability ofreadability formulas for Chinese English teaching and learning based on the CET4and CET6reading comprehension passages.The thesis gives a brief introduction of the background, purpose, andsignificance of the study. And in the second part, it is the literature review, whichpresents the definition and importance of readability, the factors affecting readability,the study of readability at home and abroad, seven widely used readability formulas.The research methodology and procedure are presented in the third chapter, includingthe approach, the selection of subjects at different English proficiency level, theinstruments, and the analysis of the data collected by measuring the readability ofreading texts. Chapter Four analyses the rank of the selected passages given by thesubjects, and then presents the reasons also given by the subjects for theirarrangement of the selected passages based on their judgment during their reading.The fifth part of the thesis investigates the nature of second language reading, anddiscusses the factors affecting reading comprehension. Especially for secondlanguage learners, the western readability formula can’t be used as an ideal tool to testthe difficulty level of reading passages. Finally, based on the empirical study, theauthor got the conclusion that the readability formulas is not suitable to test thedifficulty of reading passages for English learners in China and the last part of thethesis gives some suggestions on readability and readability formula study.