Judging readability

Abstract

Individuals are frequently called upon to judge the readability of written text. The accuracy of such judgments, studies show, ranges from high to low. This paper provides another look at the problem, based upon the judgments of 56 professional writers on five passages of text taken from a reading test. The judges were asked to rank the five passages from most readable to least readable. The results showed wide variability in the judgments. Only a few of the judges were able individually to put the passages in the tested order of readability, but the consensus of the entire group put them in exactly that order. Further examination of the results suggested that a relatively small number of gross errors in judgment were made. Accuracy of judgments, it appeared, might greatly increase with selection and/or training of judges, a procedure followed in certain studies where highly accurate judgments had been found. A readability formula was suggested as an accurate and convenient way of getting readability scores under most circumstances. Use of a formula might also, it was suggested, help a judge to increase his accuracy, but human interpretation of the scores was still felt to be needed.

Measuring translation difficulty

“…Cloze testing became the object of intensive research, with over a thousand studies published (Klare 1982 Reading ability, prior knowledge, interest, and motivation…”

Text Leveling and “Little Books” in First-Grade Reading

“…For example, we counted the number of unique words in each book (type), as well as the total number of words (tokens). Most of these measures, such as the type/token ratio have been used in previous studies examining text difficulty (Hiebert & Raphael, 1998;Klare, 1984). All of the words in all 21 texts (with the exception of the title words) were used to calculate these measures (see Table 4).…”

“…Text Leveling able to account for variations within the first grade (Klare, 1984). Neither do traditional readability formulas consider features of text support associated with predictable texts (Rhodes, 1981).…”

So What's New in the New Basals? a Focus on First Grade

“…Historically, qualities of writing that lend themselves to comprehension have been of interest to reading researchers (Klare, 1984). Readability formulas (e.g., Bormuth, 1969;Flesch, 1948) were developed to characterize reading difficulty for various-aged students and have often been used to analyze basal texts.…”

“…Readability formulas (e.g., Bormuth, 1969;Flesch, 1948) were developed to characterize reading difficulty for various-aged students and have often been used to analyze basal texts. These formulas usually included the features of number of syllables, word length, and sentence length as important factors contributing to readability (Klare, 1984). Although these formulas have been criticized for their simplicity (Kintsch, 1979) and lack of 52 Journal of Reading Behavior concern for concept load (Wepner & Feeley, 1993), we have chosen to include this analysis because of its historical importance in the "leveling" of basal readers.…”