A Comparative Study Of Reading Materials Readability In Junior High School English Textbook Between FLTRP Version And HEP Version

With the implementation of the new curriculum reform,great changes have taken place in the textbook market.The reading materials have many purposes,such as cultivating students’ reading skills;Presenting or reviewing grammar knowledge;Expanding vocabulary;Providing writing templates;Broadening students’ horizons,etc.Analyzing the reading materials in the textbooks can not only help teachers to have a deeper understanding of the textbook and use the textbook flexibly,but also help the textbook editor to perfect the textbook.Study on readability of reading materials: it is helpful to choose textbooks from the aspect of the difficulty of reading materials;It is beneficial to carry out the evaluation of junior high school English textbooks from a new perspective;It helps to optimize the teaching process.Domestic research on readability of reading materials is mainly focused on universities and senior high schools,and no one has done the readability research of the junior high schools.This paper takes the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press(FLTRP)and Hebei Education Press(HEP)as the research subjects.By using textual analysis,the readability of the two versions of textbooks is analyzed from the three aspects:lexical,syntactic,and Flesch’s readability formula.This research has three questions : 1.How is the readability of two versions of textbooks? 2.What are the suggestions for teachers? 3.What are the suggestions for textbook editors?The results show that,from the lexical aspect,the rate of new words of the HEP is higher than that of the FLTRP.The average word length of two versions is almost same.From the syntactic aspect,the average sentence length of the FLTRP is longer than that of the HEP.From the perspective of Flesch’s readability formula,the readability of reading materials of the FLTRP is lower than that of the HEP.The readability of the two versions of textbooks is judged by the variance data between units and between textbooks.The bigger the variance is,the bigger the fluctuation between the data is.The results show that the variance of the FLTRP is larger,so it can be concluded that the readability of the reading materials of the FLTRP is lower than of the HEP.Suggestions for teachers’ teaching: reasonable process of difficult reading materials to reduce the difficulty;Integrate the reading materials,combine intensive reading with extensive reading;Combine the teaching material and perfect teaching mode;Train multiple reading methods;Apply schema theory to reading teaching;Use after-class resources to deepen discourse teaching;Adjust the teaching progress according to the actual situation.Suggestions for textbook editors: from the perspective of the rate of new words,the editors should avoid the situation that the rate of new words is very high or very low;From the perspective of the average word length,the first volume of Grade 7 in the FLTRP version is the one with the longest average word length in the whole junior high school,so the average word length needs to be reduced,and the average word length between modules in the six volumes also needs to be adjusted.The average word length in the ninth grade of the HEP needs to be increased.From the perspective of the average sentence length,in view of the reading material whose average sentence is too short or too long,some words need to be added or deleted appropriately without affecting the meaning of the original text.From the perspective of readability,the second volume of Grade 9 of the FLTRP can be properly added some reading modules to improve the difficulty of reading;The difficulty of reading of the HEP between units can be adjusted appropriately.