earticle

영어

Readability is an important issue in finding the right fit between students’ reading ability and text difficulty. The purpose of this study is to analyze reading texts from the five high school English textbooks with the same number of chapters as regards their readability and to examine whether each chapter of the texts would be placed in order of difficulty. The readability was calculated with the well-known readability formulas including the Flesch-Kincaid Readability, the Gunning Fog formula, and the Coh-Metrix tool. Coh-Metrix was developed to provide a wide range of indices for the characteristics of texts on multiple levels of analysis. It is supposed to better understand differences between texts beyond traditional readability measures. This study tried to get the answer of the question: Is there, according to these readability formulas and Coh-Metrix indices, an increase in order of the difficulty throughout the whole units of the textbooks? It has been found that the difficulty changes without principle. Based on this, the suggestion is that English textbooks writers and teachers should recognize readability is the most important consideration in writing or selecting English textbooks. (Wonkwang University)