An Analysis Of Difficulty Level Of Reading Part For PEP Textbooks(2019) In Senior High School

Text difficulty,in the broad sense,refers to the difficulty of the text of the article.In the narrow sense,it refers to the complexity of the text in the language characteristics of the text(Mesmer et al.,2012).For foreign language learners,texts which are appropriate to their language level will contribute to the development of their language ability(Crossley et al.,2012),while texts that are significantly lower or higher than their language level will be detrimental to the development of their language ability.Therefore,it is necessary to match the complexity of the text with the language level of foreign language learners in order to achieve good learning results.The difficulty level of reading materials can be measured subjectively.For example,teachers can judge the difficulty of reading materials based on their previous reading experience or feedback provided by students.We can also ask experts in reading research and teaching to make a comprehensive assessment of the readability of reading materials,but the shortcomings of these measurement methods are obvious.But all of them require subjective judgment.A more reliable method of measuring difficulty level is the readability formula.Since B.A.Lively and S.L.Presey first tried to test readability in the last century,hundreds of readability formulas or graphs have come out.Although these formulas vary in validity,accuracy,computational difficulty and scope of use,their predictive variables are nothing more than vocabulary difficulty and sentence difficulty.Textbooks have become an irreplaceable and indispensable part in education in the new era.As far as English subject is concerned,the reading materials in textbooks is the most important part in English teaching.Evaluating the difficulty of textbooks can help teachers select and use textbooks effectively,and help editors improve textbooks.The author tries to test the difficulty level of the main reading passages,which were taken from the compulsory book one to three and optional compulsory one to two of the senior English textbooks published by People’s Education Press,and explores whether they follow the principle from easy to difficult.This study did the internal evaluation for the reading materials through these three aspects: lexical level,syntactic level,and the Flesch formula.We found that the change of average word length is relatively stable of the five books.The rate of new words of each unit between 5 textbooks does not follow the change from small to large,but the average new word rate of each textbook is close.The average sentence length of each unit of this textbook does not change in the order of small to large.About complex sentences,it is not arranged in the order from easy to difficult between unit to unit.The readability of each unit doesn’t show the trend from easy to difficult in each book.It is necessary to perfect the order of layout.The results of the research provide some reference for teachers to make some flexible change and knowledge expansion when using the textbook and it is a good reference for compilers in the future.