Comments on Bormuth's 'Readability: A New Approach'

Abstract

John Bormuth's paper, Readability: A New Approach, is an excellent contribution to the literature in this field. Bormuth not only suggests useful new ideas, he also presents valuable experimental research built around them. And there are few fields where this kind of imaginative contribution is more needed. Research in readability has lagged in recent years despite the increasingly widespread importance of reading and verbal learning. Bormuth attributes this lag in research to two problems: lack of valid methods for measuring the comprehension difficulty of written language, and lack of an organized body of basic research and theory upon which readability research could draw. He believes the development of the cloze test (or procedure) by Taylor (1953) presents the solution to the first problem. It is, he says, a valid, powerful, and flexible method of measuring comprehension difficulty. The organization of psycholinguistics as a discipline, he goes on to say, has solved the second problem by providing a link to research and theory in psychology, linguistics, and literary style. Thereupon he raises five questions for experimental investigation: