Abstract
This preliminary study examines the relationships between each of six first language (L1) readability indexes and the cloze passage mean performances of Russian EFL students. The cloze passages were created by randomly selecting 50 text passages from an American public library and deleting every 12th word in each passage to create a 30-item cloze procedure. The participants were 5170 EFL students from 38 universities in theRussian Federation. Each student was randomly assigned to take one of the 30-item cloze passages. The L1 readability indexes calculated for each of the 50 passages were the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, Fry, Gunning, Fog, and modified Gunning-Fog indexes. The preliminary results indicate that the L1 readability indexes were moderately to highly correlated with each other, but only somewhat correlated with the mean performances of Russian university students on cloze versions of those same passages. These results are discussed in terms of why the L1 readability indexes are moderately to highly correlated with each other but only somewhat correlated to the Russian EFL means. The authors also explain what they are planning in terms of further linguistic analyses (e.g., of variables like average word length, percent of function words, number of syllables per sentence, number of words per paragraph, frequencies of words in the passages, and so forth) and statistical analyses (including at least factor analysis, multiple regression analyses, and structural equation modeling) of these data.
Highlights
First Language Readability Readability is a concept that describes the degree to which a text is easy or difficult to read
A passage with a Fry scale index of 3.5, would be fairly easy because it would be appropriate for children who are native speakers of English in the second half of third grade, whereas a passage with an index of 13 would be more difficult because it would be suitable for first-year university-level native speakers of English
Since random selection promotes the equality of these groups in terms of overall English proficiency, the variation in means revealed in Table 2 is probably due to considerable variation in the difficulty levels of the passages involved
Summary
First Language Readability Readability is a concept that describes the degree to which a text is easy or difficult to read. A readability index is a numerical scale that estimates the readability or degree reading difficulty that native speakers are likely to have in reading a particular text. Chen, and Wang studied the readability of the cards in Stanford Research Associates (SRA) classroom reading kits. Those kits have cards at different grade levels (coded by color) that had previously been established by research into the actual performances on those cards of North American children. Chen, and Wang started by calculating the Fry readability index for each of the SRA cards. They compared the resulting Fry scale indexes with the actual native-speaker grade-level performances
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