Optimizing readability indexesan experiment on reading ease in EnglishFL textbooks

  1. Pascual Cantos Gómez 1
  2. Ángela Almela Sánchez-Lafuente 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Murcia
    info

    Universidad de Murcia

    Murcia, España

    ROR https://ror.org/03p3aeb86

Libro:
Language Windowing through Corpora
  1. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño (coord.)
  2. Begoña Crespo García (coord.)
  3. Inés Lareo Martín (coord.)
  4. Paula Lojo Sandino (coord.)

Editorial: Servizo de Publicacións ; Universidade da Coruña

ISBN: 978-84-9749-401-4

Ano de publicación: 2010

Título do volume: Part I, A-K

Volume: 1

Páxinas: 169-182

Congreso: International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (2. 2010. A Coruña)

Tipo: Achega congreso

Resumo

From their creation in the 1950s, readability indexes have been widely used in order to measure textualdifficulty. In the current paper, we examine the accuracy of the six most commonly used measures,namely Flesch Reading Ease Score, Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog, Automated ReadabilityIndex, SMOG, and Coleman-Liau Index. These measures have been applied to a number of English FLtexts, already graded into elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate, accordingto the textbooks they appear in. Subsequently, by means of the data obtained, we have come up with anew optimized measure which attempts to bring considerable benefit to the area of language teaching