Readability metrics provide information on how difficult a text is to read. This information is relevant, for instance, to identify suitable texts for learner readers. Readability metrics have been developed for several languages, but no such metrics have been developed for the indigenous South African languages. One of the limitations in the development of the metrics is the availability of texts in these languages for which the readability is known. To resolve this issue, we would like to consider texts that are used in final year exams of language subjects at highschool. We expect these texts to have consistent readability throughout the years. Additionally, in South Africa, language subjects may be taught both as home language or first additional language. We expect there to be differences in readability between the exam texts for these subjects. To test these assumptions, in this article, we compute readability scores using nine existing readability metrics for the final year exams of English home language and English first additional language. The results show that indeed the readability of the texts is consistent over the years and significantly different between the two subjects. Generalizing over these results, we expect that we can use final year exam texts of other languages to develop readability metrics for the indigenous South African languages in future work. An analysis of the performance of the readability metrics on the English texts serves as a starting point to identify useful text properties to use for the development of the readability metrics for the indigenous South African languages.

It is expected that English Home Language (Eng HL), as a subject, is more complex than English First Additional Language (Eng FAL). This article aims to uncover the reality of this expectation by comparatively investigating the linguistic complexity of texts used for reading comprehension and summaries in the final school exit examinations. The Coh-Metrix online platform was used to analyse a combined total of 24 Grade 12 final examination texts for Eng HL and Eng FAL ranging from 2008 to 2019. Five main indices relating to the word level, sentence, readability, lexical diversity and referential cohesion linguistic complexity were explored. The findings illustrated that the linguistic complexities of the texts used for reading comprehension and summary writing in the two subjects differ significantly, with Eng HL being more linguistically complex than Eng FAL texts. Furthermore, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measure indicates the Eng FAL texts as two grades below the overall grade for Eng HL texts. Nonetheless, the linguistic complexity measures used in this article confirm the expectation that texts used in Eng HL reading comprehension and summary writing are more complex than those used in Eng FAL.

Language classes are marked using rubrics. Nevertheless, using the same rubric does not necessarily automate a uniform interpretation  of the rubric. It is important to clearly define rubric criteria for teachers in order to counter the problem of misalignment in the usage of the rubric to mark learner essays. This article presents and explains a rubric explanation guide for the marking of Sesotho Grade 10 HomeLanguage creative writing essays based on the interpretations of nine teachers from six schools in the Metsimaholo education district. The explanation guide is presented bilingually in English and Sesotho. This article presents a more in-depth explanation guide for the rubricwhich was proposed in Sibeko (2016). The aim hereof is to ensure that teachers comparably understand rubric criteria and approach marking from the same point of view. For the purpose of this article, the rubric used by teachers in the said district is discussed. Both  novice and experienced teachers stand to benefit from this explained rubric guide.

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This article presents a work-in-progress doctoral project that explores measuring text readability in Sesotho, a Bantu language spoken by more than 10 million speakers across Southern Africa. The main project adopts a classical readability formulas approach to text readability analysis. We aim to adapt nine existing readability metrics into Sesotho using English as a higher-resourced helper language. So far, five resources have been developed as part of the study. The rule-based and the TeX-based syllabification systems, the syllable annotated word list, and the grade 12 exam reading comprehension and summary writing corpus have been published on the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources' (SADiLaR) online repository. The machine-translated corpus is still under development. This article describes the progress of the PhD project by overviewing the basic digital language resources developed for the project. The metrics under consideration for adaptation into Sesotho are also briefly discussed.