A continuity analysis of the reading passages of elementary school 6th grade and middle school 1st grade English textbooks.

An Analysis of Text Difficulty across Grades in Korean Middle School English Textbooks Using Coh-Metrix

“…Readability indices have also been used in textbook research for analyzing and evaluating as well as developing and modifying text materials. More specifically, researchers have been concerned with addressing such issues as whether English textbooks follow the systematic progression of text difficulty along academic years by using readability indices (Kim & Song, 2007;Im et al, 2015). For example, Im et al (2015) examined English textbooks of Grades 6 and 7 to evaluate the systematicity in difficulty progression across grade levels via Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and TTR (type-token ratio) for lexical diversity.…”

“…More specifically, researchers have been concerned with addressing such issues as whether English textbooks follow the systematic progression of text difficulty along academic years by using readability indices (Kim & Song, 2007;Im et al, 2015). For example, Im et al (2015) examined English textbooks of Grades 6 and 7 to evaluate the systematicity in difficulty progression across grade levels via Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and TTR (type-token ratio) for lexical diversity. Their findings showed that text difficulty increased with grades in terms of both readability and lexical difficulty; the gap, however, was overly wide so this failure of matching text difficulty with readers' expected level (or slightly higher than the current level) might likely cause learning difficulties.…”

“…Previous studies in the text difficulty of L2 textbooks primarily employed readability indices and text analysis tools in which their unit of analysis was predominantly limited to surface features such as word or sentence level features (Goh & Park, 2007;Im, Cho, & Jong, 2015;Kim & Chun, 2008;Kim & Song, 2007). The growing skepticism regarding the adequacy of such shallow features in determining overall text difficulty (Morales, 2019;Plakans & Bilkis, 2016;Spencer & Wagner, 2016) led to the development of more sophisticated tools such as Coh-Metrix (Graesser, Jeon, Yan, & Cai, 2007) to analyze more diverse features of text.…”