Text difficulty and accessibility: Reading formulae and expert judgement

Abstract

Text difficulty, or text “accessibility” is an important but much neglected topic in Applied Linguistics. Establishing text difficulty is relevant to the teacher and syllabus designer who wish to select appropriate materials for learners at a variety of ability levels. It is also critical to test developers in selecting reading texts at appropriate levels for inclusion into the reading sub-tests of examinations. Writers of texts for various audiences also need guidance related to the range of factors which make texts more or less accessible. In all these cases, however, decisions are still made very much on intuitive grounds. This research specifically addressed the concerns of text writers, but the findings are still relevant to the first two concerns. The research involved the analysis of a corpus of texts, and shows that factors which make the texts difficult, or less accessible, include poor linguistic structure, contextual structure, conceptual structure, and unclear operationalisation of the reader-writer relationship. It is argued that factors which are not considered in traditional readability formulae are more important determinants of text accessibility.