The analysis of reading texts about 5th and 6th grade English textbooks with 2015 Revised National Curriculum

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the readability of reading texts in the elementary school English Textbooks based on 2015 Revised National Curriculum for the 5th and 6th year students. This study compared the readability of the five English textbooks from each grade, and the ten English textbooks were analyzed using Coh-Metrix, a web-based language corpus analysis tool. The Coh-Metrix indices used for the current study are descriptive, lexical features, word information, syntactic complexity and readability scores. This study investigated the continuity of the English textbooks of elementary school 5th and 6th grades by analyzing the readability. The following summary concludes the research findings. First, statistically significant differences were found among English textbooks of each grade in the descriptive counts like the number of words and sentences, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity, whereas, there were no significant differences in word information and standard readability indices. Second, there were statistically significant differences in descriptive counts, syntactic complexity and readability scores between 5th and 6th grade reading texts, but no significant differences existed in lexical diversity and word information. Further important implications and suggestions regarding the elementary English textbooks were discussed.