Readability Assessment of Advanced English Textbooks: A Corpus-Linguistic Study

Abstract

As a quantitative index of the ease of reading text, readability has been used as an effective manner to assess the difficulty of reading textbooks. Based on a corpus consisting of 40 texts from two sets of advanced English textbooks published by two top-tier publishing houses in China in the same year, this paper employs three readability formulas (i.e. FRE, FKGL and LR) to examine their readability trends and differences in readability. The results show that: 1) the readability of both book sets is low, 2) no significant differences are found in three readability indices, 3) some of LR subindices, such as deep cohesion and connectivity, show an opposite tendency to the overall readability. It is claimed that: 1) both book sets are fairly difficult to read; 2) they are interchangeable in the teaching process without the absolute difference in authoritativeness; 3) the increasing trend of overall readability is moderated by controlling some subindices deliberately to keep the balance between text-reading difficulty and practical demands. This study not only benefits scholars but also teachers to evaluate and improve English textbooks.