The Analysis Of The Readability Of Reading Part In Senior English For Schools’ Compulsory Textbooks

It should be gradual to order the English teaching materials, from easy to difficult.Evaluating the readability of textbooks can help teachers to select and use them effectively,and help editors to improve them.This study did the internal evaluation for the reading materials through these four aspects: lexical level, syntactic level,the topic,and the Flesch readability formula. Furthermore,The author also did the external evaluation through the reading difficulty interview from 14 English teachers and 112 sophomore students,who were selected randomly.Through internal and external evaluation,the author tries to test the readability of the main reading passages, which take from the compulsory book one to five of the Senior English for Schools(SEFS) textbooks published by Chongqing University Press,and explores whether they follow the principle from easy to difficult.We found that the readability is gradual from book one to five.However,the readability of every unit doesn’t show the trend from easy to difficult in each book.It is necessary to perfect the order of layout.And the reading materials in compulsory book 5 are too difficult for students,so they need to be replaced or rewritten.In addition, the new word rate of several units is relatively high.Too many unfamiliar words will reduce the students’ confidence while reading.Teachers can make some necessary complements according to the students’ current learning ability,to develop their self-learning and enhance their enthusiasm for learning English.Editors can use the data of this study for reference to make the reading materials more reasonably,and optimize the textbooks.