A Study On The Effects Of Text Difficulty On Reading Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

Currently,lots of researchers at home and abroad have analyzed the text variable which affected students' reading comprehension.Some of them investigated it by simplifying text,some measured the difficulty of textbooks and related English reading comprehension texts via readability formula.But most of the subjects were college students,and just a few researches focused on senior high school students.Researches which combined text simplification and readability formula to study the text difficulty on English reading comprehension of high school students was even fewer.On the basis of previous studies,the second reading comprehension text of 2015 National College Entrance Examination(New Standard I)was a test text whose lexical and syntactic expression have been made easy for the present research.So we had original text,lexical simplified text and syntactic simplified text on hand.These three types of texts had the same meaning but in different expressing ways.The difficulty of the three texts was tested by Flesch Reading Ease of Microsoft Word.The readability index was the reference for text difficulty.165 senior high school students from three natural classes in Grade Two in Zhangzhou were chosen as the subjects.The experimental statistics were analyzed by the software SPSS17.0,including one-way ANOVA,two-way ANOVA and simple effect test.The study tried to find the impact of the text difficulty factors on high school students,especially for intermediate-level and low-level students.The results of this study showed that different text difficulty(original text,lexical simplification text,syntactic simplification text)indeed differentiated the senior high school students' s English reading comprehension.1.Lexical simplification had a positive influence on students' reading comprehension while syntactic simplification hindered their reading comprehension slightly.2.Lexical simplification and syntactic simplification had a significant impact on reading comprehension of intermediate-level and low-level senior high school students,but not significantly on the high-level students.Lexical simplification improved intermediate-level and low-level students' reading comprehension while syntacticsimplification hindered their reading comprehension slightly.Although lexical and syntactic simplification could improve the high-level students' reading comprehension,but the effects were not so obvious.This study showed that lexical simplification greatly improved English reading comprehension of senior high school students.So to take the current research into consideration,the author suggests that we can apply simplified lexical and syntactic text and readability formula into teaching.For example,if permitted,teachers can make difficult reading easy by simplifying the vocabulary.This is a method which could be applied when teaching the intermediate-level and low-level students.It serves as a good way to encourage students to do reading and hold their interests in English learning.Therefore,when experts compile the textbook exercise and extracurricular supplementary readings,they can simplify the reading texts for the students of intermediate and low levels in senior high school.