A Study On Readability And Comprehensibility Of Lanzhou English Publicity Materials

With the proposing of the notion “China Dream” and “the Belt and the Road Initiative” by President Xi Jinping, the communication between China and the world is becoming more and more frequent. Therefore, foreign publicity work has increasingly shown its importance. Lanzhou, as the capital city of Gansu province, is the political, economic, cultural and scientific & educational center. It is the second largest city in the northwest of China and the only provincial capital city with the Yellow River flowing through its downtown. Lanzhou has a long history and a splendid culture. And it is also an important part of the ancient Silk Road. The holding of Lanzhou International Marathon, the construction of Lanzhou New District and the holding of China Golden Rooster Film Festival all indicate that Lanzhou is making a great effort to present a wonderful city image to the world. In various methods and ways of conducting foreign publicity work, readable and comprehensible English publicity materials of Lanzhou play an indispensable role.Therefore, the present thesis evaluates the readability and comprehensibility of Lanzhou English publicity materials based on three theories put forward by modern linguistics, which are the cognitive processing perspective, the construction-integration model of text comprehension and the tripartite model of communicative effectiveness. The author selects six texts from Lanzhou portal web site(www. Lanzhou. cn) as its research materials, employs four most useful and popular readability formulas(Flesch formula, New Dale-Chall formula, Gunning fog formula and SMOG formula) to assess readability of Lanzhou English publicity materials and chooses question-answer test and cloze test to evaluate the comprehensibility of the materials.The results shows:(1) In terms of readability, Lanzhou English publicity materials are not easy to read. The target readers' failure to understand the materials caused by three aspects. One is that the sentences in the publicity materials are too long and too complex to understand. Average sentence length is 20 words. The other is that the statistics of syllables shows that the publicity materials contained a large proportion of polysyllable words, especially the amount of words with 3+ syllables. Another is that the publicity materials have too many hard words.(2) Based on the tests of comprehensibility, Lanzhou English publicity materials are hard to understand. The reasons that cause the difficulties can be concluded from three perspectives. First, cohesion and coherence are very important for readers to understand a text. A well-written and fully coherent text can be understood more easily than a poor-written one. However, the results of comprehensibility test indicate that the cohesion and coherence of Lanzhou English publicity materials are relatively low. An example of it is that the referent words in the text cannot be identified. Second, the illogical expressions and the misuse of words impede the target readers' to obtain necessary information. The way of narration does not fit English idiomatic expressions. Third, for the target readers, there is little explanatory and introductory information in the materials. For example, the proper nouns are not explained in details. It makes foreign friends who know little about Lanzhou hard to understand it.In order to introduce Lanzhou city to foreign friends better, to make the world recognize and know it fully and accurately, to attract more foreigners travel around it and to draw more foreign enterprises to invest and set up branches in it, the thesis also puts forward possible solutions to solving the existing problems and improving the quality and communicating effectiveness of Lanzhou English publicity materials.