Measuring Readability for Learners of English as a Foreign Language by Linguistic and Learner Features
The Internet serves as a source of authentic reading material, enabling learners to practice English in real contexts when learning English as a foreign language. An adaptive computer-assisted language learning and teaching system can assist in obtaining
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Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka, Japan [email protected] 2 Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan
Abstract. The Internet serves as a source of authentic reading material, enabling learners to practice English in real contexts when learning English as a foreign language. An adaptive computer-assisted language learning and teaching system can assist in obtaining authentic materials such as news articles from the Internet. However, to match material level to a learner’s reading proficiency, the system must be equipped with a method to measure proficiency-based readability. There‐ fore, we developed a method for doing so. With our method, readability is meas‐ ured through regression analysis using both learner and linguistic features as independent variables. Learner features account for learner reading proficiency, and linguistic features explain lexical, syntactic, and semantic difficulties of sentences. A cross validation test showed that readability measured with our method exhibited higher correlation (r = 0.60) than readability measured only with linguistic features (r = 0.46). A comparison of our method with the method without learner features showed a statistically significant difference. These results suggest the effectiveness of combined learner and linguistic features for meas‐ uring reading proficiency-based readability. Keywords: Computer-assisted language learning and teaching · English as a foreign language · Readability · Linguistic and learner feature
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Introduction
When teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), teachers need to choose reading materials that suit an EFL learner’s reading proficiency. The choice of the materials plays an important role, especially when material is chosen from resources that are not prepared for pedagogical purposes, but from those used by English speakers in daily situations which can be inappropriate for a particular learner’s capabilities. Appropriate materials will support effective EFL learning, and inappropriate materials can reduce the learning motivation [1, 2] and be detrimental to the learning process. Finding appropriate materials is a time consuming task for teachers. When teachers gather teaching resources, they need to check the difficulty of the resources in order to choose reading materials that suit for learners’ proficiency. The burden of this check-up can be reduced if teachers use readability measuring methods, and calculate readability scores for each candidate material. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 K. Hasida and A. Purwarianti (Eds.): PACLING 2015, CCIS 593, pp. 211–222, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-0515-2_15
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K. Kotani and T. Yoshimi
Here, readability is defined as the difficulty for EFL learners in understanding a reading material. The readability is supposed to depend on the linguistic features of a text such as the sentence length and word length. The use of a readability measuring method has advantages not only for teachers but also EFL learners. If a readability measuring method is available for EFL learners, they can
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