Definition
People have defined readability in various ways, e.g., in: The Literacy Dictionary,Harris, Theodore L. and Richard E. Hodges, eds. 1995. ''The Literacy Dictionary, The Vocabulary of Reading and Writing.'' Newark, DE: International Reading Assn. Jeanne Chall and Edgar Dale,Dale, Edgar and Jeanne S. Chall. 1949. "The concept of readability." ''Elementary English'' 26:23. G. Harry McLaughlin,McLaughlin, G. H. 1969. "SMOG grading-a new readability formula." ''Journal of reading'' 22:639–646. William DuBay.DuBay, W. H. 2006. ''Smart language: Readers, Readability, and the Grading of Text''. Costa Mesa:Impact Information.Applications
Easy reading helps learning and enjoyment,Fry, Edward B. 2006. "Readability." ''Reading Hall of Fame Book.'' Newark, DE: International Reading Assn. and can save money.Kimble, Joe. 1996–97. ''Writing for dollars. Writing to please.'' ''Scribes journal of legal writing'' 6. Available online atReadability and newspaper readership
Several studies in the 1940s showed that even small increases in readability greatly increases readership in large-circulation newspapers. In 1947, Donald Murphy of ''Wallace's Farmer'' used a split-run edition to study the effects of making text easier to read. They found that reducing from the 9th to the 6th-grade reading level increased readership by 43% for an article on 'nylon'. The result was a gain of 42,000 readers in a circulation of 275,000. He also found a 60% increase in readership for an article on corn, with better responses from people under 35.Murphy, D. 1947. "How plain talk increases readership 45% to 60%." ''Printer's ink.'' 220:35–37. Wilber Schramm interviewed 1,050 newspaper readers. He found that an easier reading style helps to determine how much of an article is read. This was called reading persistence, depth, or perseverance. He also found that people will read less of long articles than of short ones. A story nine paragraphs long will lose 3 out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph. A shorter story will lose only two. Schramm also found that the use of subheads, bold-face paragraphs, and stars to break up a story actually lose readers.Schramm, W. 1947. "Measuring another dimension of newspaper readership." ''Journalism quarterly'' 24:293–306. A study in 1947 by Melvin Lostutter showed that newspapers generally were written at a level five years above the ability of average American adult readers. The reading ease of newspaper articles was not found to have much connection with the education, experience, or personal interest of the journalists writing the stories. It instead had more to do with the convention and culture of the industry. Lostutter argued for more readability testing in newspaper writing. Improved readability must be a "conscious process somewhat independent of the education and experience of the staffs ''writers.''"''Lostutter, M. 1947. "Some critical factors in newspaper readability." ''Journalism quarterly'' 24:307–314.'' A study by Charles Swanson in 1948 showed that better readability increases the total number of paragraphs read by 93% and the number of readers reading every paragraph by 82%.Swanson, C. E. 1948. "Readability and readership: A controlled experiment." ''Journalism quarterly'' 25:339–343. In 1948, Bernard Feld did a study of every item and ad in the ''Birmingham News'' of 20 November 1947. He divided the items into those above the 8th-grade level and those at the 8th grade or below. He chose the 8th-grade breakpoint, as that was determined to be the average reading level of adult readers. An 8th-grade text "...will reach about 50% of all American grown-ups," he wrote. Among the wire-service stories, the lower group got two-thirds more readers, and among local stories, 75% more readers. Feld also believed in drilling writers in Flesch's clear-writing principles.Feld, B. 1948. "Empirical test proves clarity adds readers." ''Editor and publisher'' 81:38. Both Rudolf Flesch and Robert Gunning worked extensively with newspapers and the wire services in improving readability. Mainly through their efforts in a few years, the readability of US newspapers went from the 16th to the 11th-grade level, where it remains today. The two publications with the largest circulations, ''TV Guide'' (13 million) and ''Reader's Digest'' (12 million), are written at the 9th-grade level. The most popular novels are written at the 7th-grade level. This supports the fact that the average adult reads at the 9th-grade level. It also shows that, for recreation, people read texts that are two grades below their actual reading level.The George Klare studies
George Klare and his colleagues looked at the effects of greater reading ease on Air Force recruits. They found that more readable texts resulted in greater and more complete learning. They also increased the amount read in a given time, and made for easier acceptance.Klare, G. R., J. E. Mabry, and L. M. Gustafson. 1955. "The relationship of style difficulty to immediate retention and to acceptability of technical material." ''Journal of educational psychology'' 46:287–295.Klare, G. R., E. H. Shuford, and W. H. Nichols. 1957 . "The relationship of style difficulty, practice, and efficiency of reading and retention." ''Journal of Applied Psychology.'' 41:222–26. Other studies by Klare showed how the reader's skills,Klare, G. R. 1976. "A second look at the validity of the readability formulas." ''Journal of reading behavior.'' 8:129–52. prior knowledge,Klare, G. R. 1985. "Matching reading materials to readers: The role of readability estimates in conjunction with other information about comprehensibility." In ''Reading, thinking, and concept development,'' eds. T. L Harris and E. J. Cooper. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. interest, and motivation affect reading ease.Early research
In the 1880s, English professor L. A. Sherman found that the English sentence was getting shorter. In Elizabethan times, the average sentence was 50 words long. In his own time, it was 23 words long. Sherman's work established that: * Literature is a subject for statistical analysis. * Shorter sentences and concrete terms help people to make sense of what is written. * Speech is easier to understand than text. * Over time, text becomes easier if it is more like speech. Sherman wrote: "Literary English, in short, will follow the forms of standard spoken English from which it comes. No man should talk worse than he writes, no man should write better than he should talk.... The oral sentence is clearest because it is the product of millions of daily efforts to be clear and strong. It represents the work of the race for thousands of years in perfecting an effective instrument of communication."Sherman, Lucius Adelno 1893. ''Analytics of literature: A manual for the objective study of English prose and poetry''. Boston: Ginn and Co. In 1889 in Russia, the writer Nikolai A. Rubakin published a study of over 10,000 texts written by everyday people. From these texts, he took 1,500 words he thought most people understood. He found that the main blocks to comprehension are ''unfamiliar words'' and ''long sentences''.Lorge, I. 1944. "Word lists as background for communication." ''Teachers College Record'' 45:543–552. Starting with his own journal at the age of 13, Rubakin published many articles and books on science and many subjects for the great numbers of new readers throughout Russia. In Rubakin's view, the people were not fools. They were simply poor and in need of cheap books, written at a level they could grasp. In 1921, Harry D. Kitson published ''The Mind of the Buyer'', one of the first books to apply psychology to marketing. Kitson's work showed that each type of reader bought and read their own type of text. On reading two newspapers and two magazines, he found that short sentence length and short word length were the best contributors to reading ease.Kitson, Harry D. 1921. ''The Mind of the Buyer.'' New York: Macmillan.Text leveling
The earliest reading ease assessment is the subjective judgment termed ''text leveling''. Formulas do not fully address the various content, purpose, design, visual input, and organization of a text.Clay, M. 1991. ''Becoming literate: The construction of inner control.'' Portsmouth, NH: Heinneman.Fry, E. B. 2002. "Text readability versus leveling." ''Reading Teacher'' 56 no. 23:286–292.Chall, J. S., J. L. Bissex, S. S. Conard, and S. H. Sharples. 1996. ''Qualitative assessment of text difficulty: A practical guide for teachers and writers.'' Cambridge MA: Brookline Books. Text leveling is commonly used to rank the reading ease of texts in areas where reading difficulties are easy to identify, such as books for young children. At higher levels, ranking reading ease becomes more difficult, as individual difficulties become harder to identify. This has led to better ways to assess reading ease.Vocabulary frequency lists
In the 1920s, the scientific movement in education looked for tests to measure students' achievement to aid in curriculum development. Teachers and educators had long known that, to improve reading skill, readers—especially beginning readers—need reading material that closely matches their ability. University-based psychologists did much of the early research, which was later taken up by textbook publishers. Educational psychologistEarly children's readability formulas
In 1923, Bertha A. Lively and Sidney L. Pressey published the first reading ease formula. They were concerned that junior high school science textbooks had so many technical words. They felt that teachers spent all class time explaining these words. They argued that their formula would help to measure and reduce the "vocabulary burden" of textbooks. Their formula used five variable inputs and six constants. For each thousand words, it counted the number of unique words, the number of words not on the Thorndike list, and the median index number of the words found on the list. Manually, it took three hours to apply the formula to a book.Lively, Bertha A. and S. L. Pressey. 1923. "A method for measuring the 'vocabulary burden' of textbooks. ''Educational administration and supervision'' 9:389–398. After the Lively–Pressey study, people looked for formulas that were more accurate and easier to apply. By 1980, over 200 formulas were published in different languages. In 1928, Carleton Washburne and Mabel Vogel created the first modern readability formula. They validated it by using an outside criterion, and correlated .845 with test scores of students who read and liked the criterion books.The Classic Readability Studies, William H. DuBay, Editor (chapter on Washburne, C. i M. Vogel. 1928).Early adult readability formulas
During the recession of the 1930s, the U.S. government invested in adult education. In 1931,Popular readability formulas
The Flesch formulas
In 1943, Rudolf Flesch published his PhD dissertation, ''Marks of a Readable Style'', which included a readability formula to predict the difficulty of adult reading material. Investigators in many fields began using it to improve communications. One of the variables it used was ''personal references,'' such as names and personal pronouns. Another variable was ''affixes''.Flesch, R. "Marks of a readable style." ''Columbia University contributions to education,'' no. 187. New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1948, Flesch published his Reading Ease formula in two parts. Rather than using grade levels, it used a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 equivalent to the 12th grade and 100 equivalent to the 4th grade. It dropped the use of affixes. The second part of the formula predicts human interest by using personal references and the number of personal sentences. The new formula correlated 0.70 with the McCall-Crabbs reading tests.Flesch, R. 1948. "A new readability yardstick." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 32:221–33. The original formula is: :Reading Ease score = 206.835 − (1.015 × ASL) − (84.6 × ASW) ::Where: ASL = average sentence length (number of words divided by number of sentences) :: ASW = average word length in syllables (number of syllables divided by number of words) Publishers discovered that the Flesch formulas could increase readership up to 60%. Flesch's work also made an enormous impact on journalism. The Flesch Reading Ease formula became one of the most widely used, tested, and reliable readability metrics.Klare, G. R. 1963. ''The measurement of readability''. Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press.Chall, J. S. 1958. ''Readability: An appraisal of research and application.'' Columbus, OH: Bureau of Educational Research, Ohio State University. In 1951, Farr, Jenkins, and Patterson simplified the formula further by changing the syllable count. The modified formula is: :New reading ease score = 1.599nosw − 1.015sl − 31.517 ::Where: nosw = number of one-syllable words per 100 words and ::sl = average sentence length in words.Farr, J. N., J. J. Jenkins, and D. G. Paterson. 1951. "Simplification of the Flesch Reading Ease Formula." ''Journal of Applied Psychology.'' 35, no. 5:333–357. In 1975, in a project sponsored by the U.S. Navy, the Reading Ease formula was recalculated to give a grade-level score. The new formula is now called the Flesch–Kincaid grade-level formula.Kincaid, J. P., R. P. Fishburne, R. L. Rogers, and B. S. Chissom. 1975. ''Derivation of new readability formulas (Automated Readability Index, Fog Count, and Flesch Reading Ease Formula) for Navy enlisted personnel.'' CNTECHTRA Research Branch Report 8-75. The Flesch–Kincaid formula is one of the most popular and heavily tested formulas. It correlates 0.91 with comprehension as measured by reading tests.The Dale–Chall formula
Edgar Dale, a professor of education at Ohio State University, was one of the first critics of Thorndike's vocabulary-frequency lists. He claimed that they did not distinguish between the different meanings that many words have. He created two new lists of his own. One, his "short list" of 769 easy words, was used by Irving Lorge in his formula. The other was his "long list" of 3,000 easy words, which were understood by 80% of fourth-grade students. However, one has to extend the word lists by regular plurals of nouns, regular forms of the past tense of verbs, progressive forms of verbs etc. In 1948, he incorporated this list into a formula he developed with Jeanne S. Chall, who later founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory. To apply the formula: # Select several 100-word samples throughout the text. # Compute the average sentence length in words (divide the number of words by the number of sentences). # Compute the percentage of words NOT on the Dale–Chall word list of 3,000 easy words. # Compute this equation from 1948: #: Raw score = 0.1579*(PDW) + 0.0496*(ASL) if the percentage of PDW is less than 5%, otherwise compute #: Raw score = 0.1579*(PDW) + 0.0496*(ASL) + 3.6365 Where: :Raw score = uncorrected reading grade of a student who can answer one-half of the test questions on a passage. :PDW = Percentage of difficult words not on the Dale–Chall word list. :ASL = Average sentence length Finally, to compensate for the "grade-equivalent curve", apply the following chart for the Final Score: Dale, E. and J. S. Chall. 1948. '"A formula for predicting readability". ''Educational research bulletin'' Jan. 21 and Feb 17, 27:1–20, 37–54. Correlating 0.93 with comprehension as measured by reading tests, the Dale–Chall formula is the most reliable formula and is widely used in scientific research. In 1995, Dale and Chall published a new version of their formula with an upgraded word list, the New Dale–Chall readability formula.Chall, J. S. and E. Dale. 1995. ''Readability revisited: The new Dale–Chall readability formula.'' Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. Its formula is: Raw score = 64 - 0.95 *(PDW) - 0.69 *(ASL)The Gunning fog formula
In the 1940s, Robert Gunning helped bring readability research into the workplace. In 1944, he founded the first readability consulting firm dedicated to reducing the "fog" in newspapers and business writing. In 1952, he published ''The Technique of Clear Writing'' with his own Fog Index, a formula that correlates 0.91 with comprehension as measured by reading tests. The formula is one of the most reliable and simplest to apply: :Grade level= 0.4 * ( (average sentence length) + (percentage of Hard Words) ) :Where: Hard Words = words with more than two syllables.Gunning, R. 1952. ''The Technique of Clear Writing''. New York: McGraw–Hill.Fry readability graph
In 1963, while teaching English teachers in Uganda, Edward Fry developed his Readability Graph. It became one of the most popular formulas and easiest to apply.Fry, E. B. 1963. ''Teaching faster reading''. London: Cambridge University Press.Fry, E. B. 1968. "A readability formula that saves time." '' Journal of reading '' 11:513–516. The Fry Graph correlates 0.86 with comprehension as measured by reading tests.McLaughlin's SMOG formula
Harry McLaughlin determined that word length and sentence length should be multiplied rather than added as in other formulas. In 1969, he published his SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) formula: :SMOG grading = 3 + . :Where: polysyllable count = number of words of more than two syllables in a sample of 30 sentences. The SMOG formula correlates 0.88 with comprehension as measured by reading tests. It is often recommended for use in healthcare.Doak, C. C., L. G. Doak, and J. H. Root. 1996. ''Teaching patients with low literacy skills''. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Company.The FORCAST formula
In 1973, a study commissioned by the US military of the reading skills required for different military jobs produced the FORCAST formula. Unlike most other formulas, it uses only a vocabulary element, making it useful for texts without complete sentences. The formula satisfied requirements that it would be: * Based on Army-job reading materials. * Suitable for the young adult-male recruits. * Easy enough for Army clerical personnel to use without special training or equipment. The formula is: :Grade level = 20 − (''N'' / 10) :Where N = number of single-syllable words in a 150-word sample.Caylor, J. S., T. G. Stitch, L. C. Fox, and J. P. Ford. 1973. ''Methodologies for determining reading requirements of military occupational specialties: Technical report No. 73-5''. Alexander, VA:The Golub Syntactic Density Score
The Golub Syntactic Density Score was developed by Lester Golub in 1974. It is among a smaller subset of readability formulas that concentrate on the syntactic features of a text. To calculate the reading level of a text, a sample of several hundred words is taken from the text. The number of words in the sample is counted, as are the number of T-units. A T-unit is defined as an independent clause and any dependent clauses attached to it. Other syntactical units are then counted and entered into the following table: 1. Words/T-unit .95 X _________ ___ 2. Subordinate clauses/T-unit .90 X _________ ___ 3. Main clause word length (mean) .20 X _________ ___ 4. Subordinate clause length (mean) .50 X _________ ___ 5. Number of Modals (will, shall, can, may, must, would...) .65 X _________ ___ 6. Number of ''Be'' and ''Have'' forms in the auxiliary .40 X _________ ___ 7. Number of Prepositional Phrases .75 X _________ ___ 8. Number of Possessive nouns and pronouns .70 X _________ ___ 9. Number of Adverbs of Time (when, then, once, while...) .60 X _________ ___ 10. Number of gerunds, participles, and absolutes Phrases .85 X _________ ___ Users add the numbers in the right hand column and divide the total by the number of T-units. Finally, the quotient is entered into the following table to arrive at a final readability score.Measuring coherence and organization
For centuries, teachers and educators have seen the importance of organization, coherence, and emphasis in good writing. Beginning in the 1970s, cognitive theorists began teaching that reading is really an act of thinking and organization. The reader constructs meaning by mixing new knowledge into existing knowledge. Because of the limits of the reading ease formulas, some research looked at ways to measure the content, organization, and coherence of text. Although this did not improve the reliability of the formulas, their efforts showed the importance of these variables in reading ease. Studies by Walter Kintch and others showed the central role of coherence in reading ease, mainly for people learning to read.Kintsch, W. and J. R. Miller 1981. "Readability: A view from cognitive psychology." In ''Teaching: Research reviews.'' Newark, DE: International Reading Assn. In 1983, Susan Kemper devised a formula based on physical states and mental states. However, she found this was no better than word familiarity and sentence length in showing reading ease.Kemper, S. 1983. "Measuring the inference load of a text." ''Journal of educational psychology'' 75, no. 3:391–401. Bonnie Meyer and others tried to use organization as a measure of reading ease. While this did not result in a formula, they showed that people read faster and retain more when the text is organized in topics. She found that a visible plan for presenting content greatly helps readers to assess a text. A hierarchical plan shows how the parts of the text are related. It also aids the reader in blending new information into existing knowledge structures.Meyer, B. J. 1982. "Reading research and the teacher: The importance of plans." ''College composition and communication'' 33, no. 1:37–49. Bonnie Armbruster found that the most important feature for learning and comprehension is textual coherence, which comes in two types: *Global coherence, which integrates high-level ideas as themes in an entire section, chapter, or book. *Local coherence, which joins ideas within and between sentences. Armbruster confirmed Kintsch's finding that coherence and structure are more help for younger readers.Armbruster, B. B. 1984. "The problem of inconsiderate text" In ''Comprehension instruction'', ed. G. Duffy. New York: Longmann, p. 202–217. R. C. Calfee and R. Curley built on Bonnie Meyer's work and found that an unfamiliar underlying structure can make even simple text hard to read. They brought in a graded system to help students progress from simpler story lines to more advanced and abstract ones.Calfee, R. C. and R. Curley. 1984. "Structures of prose in content areas." In ''Understanding reading comprehension'', ed. J. Flood. Newark, DE: International Reading Assn., pp. 414–430. Many other studies looked at the effects on reading ease of other text variables, including: * Image words, abstraction, direct and indirect statements, types of narration and sentences, phrases, and clauses; * Difficult concepts; * Idea density;Dolch. E. W. 1939. "Fact burden and reading difficulty." ''Elementary English review'' 16:135–138. * Human interest; * Nominalization;Coleman, E. B. and P. J. Blumenfeld. 1963. "Cloze scores of nominalization and their grammatical transformations using active verbs." ''Psychology reports'' 13:651–654. * Active and passive voice;Gough, P. B. 1965. "Grammatical transformations and the speed of understanding." ''Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior'' 4:107–111.Coleman, E. B. 1966. "Learning of prose written in four grammatical transformations." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 49:332–341.Clark, H. H. and S. E. Haviland. 1977. "Comprehension and the given-new contract." In ''Discourse production and comprehension,'' ed. R. O. Freedle. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Press, pp. 1–40.Hornby, P. A. 1974. "Surface structure and presupposition." ''Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior'' 13:530–538. * Embeddedness; * Structural cues;Spyridakis, J. H. 1989. "Signaling effects: A review of the research-Part 1." ''Journal of technical writing and communication'' 19, no 3:227-240.Spyridakis, J. H. 1989. "Signaling effects: Increased content retention and new answers-Part 2." ''Journal of technical writing and communication'' 19, no. 4:395–415. * The use of images;Halbert, M. G. 1944. "The teaching value of illustrated books." ''American school board journal'' 108, no. 5:43–44.Vernon, M. D. 1946. "Learning from graphic material." ''British journal of psychology'' 36:145–158. * Diagrams and line graphs;Felker, D. B., F. Pickering, V. R. Charrow, V. M. Holland, and J. C. Redish. 1981. ''Guidelines for document designers.'' Washington, D. C: American Institutes for Research. * Highlighting;Klare, G. R., J. E. Mabry, and L. M. Gustafson. 1955. "The relationship of patterning (underlining) to immediate retention and to acceptability of technical material." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 39, no 1:40–42. *Fonts and layout;Klare, G. R. 1957. "The relationship of typographic arrangement to the learning of technical material." ''Journal of Applied Psychology'' 41, no 1:41–45. *Document age.Jatowt, A. and K. Tanaka. 2012. "Longitudinal analysis of historical texts' readability." ''Proceedings of Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2012'' 353-354Advanced readability formulas
The John Bormuth formulas
John Bormuth of the University of Chicago looked at reading ease using the new Cloze deletion test developed by Wilson Taylor. His work supported earlier research including the degree of reading ease for each kind of reading. The best level for classroom "assisted reading" is a slightly difficult text that causes a "set to learn", and for which readers can correctly answer 50% of the questions of a multiple-choice test. The best level for unassisted reading is one for which readers can correctly answer 80% of the questions. These cutoff scores were later confirmed by VygotskyVygotsky, L. 1978. ''Mind in society.'' Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. and Chall and Conard.Chall, J. S. and S. S. Conard. 1991. ''Should textbooks challenge students? The case for easier or harder textbooks.'' New York: Teachers College Press. Among other things, Bormuth confirmed that vocabulary and sentence length are the best indicators of reading ease. He showed that the measures of reading ease worked as well for adults as for children. The same things that children find hard are the same for adults of the same reading levels. He also developed several new measures of cutoff scores. One of the most well known was the ''Mean Cloze Formula'', which was used in 1981 to produce the ''Degree of Reading Power'' system used by the College Entrance Examination Board.Bormuth, J. R. 1966. "Readability: A new approach." ''Reading research quarterly 1:79–132.''Bormuth, J. R. 1969. ''Development of readability analysis'': Final Report, Project no 7-0052, Contract No. OEC-3-7-0070052-0326. Washington, D. C.: U. S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research, U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.Bormuth, J. R. 1971. ''Development of standards of readability: Towards a rational criterion of passage performance.'' Washington, D. C.: U. S. Office of Education, Bureau of Research, U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.The Lexile framework
In 1988, Jack Stenner and his associates at MetaMetrics, Inc. published a new system, the Lexile Framework, for assessing readability and matching students with appropriate texts. The Lexile framework uses average sentence length, and average word frequency in the American Heritage Intermediate Corpus to predict a score on a 0–2000 scale. The AHI Corpus includes five million words from 1,045 published works often read by students in grades three to nine. The Lexile Book Database has more than 100,000 titles from more than 450 publishers. By knowing a student's Lexile score, a teacher can find books that match his or her reading level.Stenner, A. J., I Horabin, D. R. Smith, and R. Smith. 1988. ''The Lexile Framework.'' Durham, NC: Metametrics.ATOS readability formula for books
In 2000, researchers of the School Renaissance Institute and Touchstone Applied Science Associates published their Advantage-TASA Open Standard (ATOS) Reading ease Formula for Books. They worked on a formula that was easy to use and that could be used with any texts. The project was one of the widest reading ease projects ever. The developers of the formula used 650 normed reading texts, 474 million words from all the text in 28,000 books read by students. The project also used the reading records of more than 30,000 who read and were tested on 950,000 books. They found that three variables give the most reliable measure of text reading ease: *words per sentence *average grade level of words *characters per word They also found that: *To help learning, the teacher should match book reading ease with reading skill. *Reading often helps with reading gains. *For reading alone below the 4th grade, the best learning gain requires at least 85% comprehension. *Advanced readers need 92% comprehension for independent reading. *Book length can be a good measure of reading ease. *Feedback and interaction with the teacher are the most important factors in reading.School Renaissance Institute. 2000. ''The ATOS readability formula for books and how it compares to other formulas.'' Madison, WI: School Renaissance Institute, Inc.Paul, T. 2003. ''Guided independent reading.'' Madison, WI: School Renaissance Institute, IncCohMetrix psycholinguistics measurements
Coh-Metrix can be used in many different ways to investigate the cohesion of the explicit text and the coherence of the mental representation of the text. "Our definition of cohesion consists of characteristics of the explicit text that play some role in helping the reader mentally connect ideas in the text." The definition of coherence is the subject of much debate. Theoretically, the coherence of a text is defined by the interaction between linguistic representations and knowledge representations. While coherence can be defined as characteristics of the text (i.e., aspects of cohesion) that are likely to contribute to the coherence of the mental representation, Coh-Metrix measurements provide indices of these cohesion characteristics.Other formulas
* Automated readability index (1967) * Linsear Write Raygor readability estimate (1977) * Spache readability formula (1952)Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach
Unlike the traditional readability formulas,Corpora
WeeBit
In 2012, Sowmya Vajjala at theNewsela
Wei Xu (Linguistic features
Lexico-Semantic
The type-token ratio is one of the features that are often used to captures the lexical richness, which is a measure of vocabulary range and diversity. To measure the lexical difficulty of a word, the relative frequency of the word in a representative corpus like the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is often used. Below includes some examples for lexico-semantic features in readability assessment. *Average number of syllables per word *Out-of-vocabulary rate, in comparison to the full corpus *Type-token ratio: the ratio of unique terms to total terms observed *Ratio of function words, in comparison to the full corpus *Ratio of pronouns, in comparison to the full corpus *Language model perplexity (comparing the text to generic or genre-specific models) In addition, Lijun Feng pioneered the cognitively-motivated features (mostly lexical) in 2009. This was during herSyntactic
Syntactic complexity is correlated with longer processing times in text comprehension. It is common to use a rich set of these syntactic features to predict the readability of a text. The more advanced variants of syntactic readability features are frequently computed from parse tree. Emily Pitler (Using the readability formulas
The accuracy of readability formulas increases when finding the average readability of a large number of works. The tests generate a score based on characteristics such asSee also
* Asemic writing *References
Further reading
* Harris, A. J. and E. Sipay. 1985. ''How to increase reading ability, 8th Ed.'' New York & London: Longman. * Ruddell, R. B. 1999. ''Teaching children to read and write.'' Boston: Allyn and Bacon. * Manzo, A. V. and U. C. Manzo. 1995. ''Teaching children to be literate.'' Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace. * Vacca, J. A., R. Vacca, and M. K. Gove. 1995. ''Reading and learning to read.'' New York: HarperCollins.External links