A Study On Reading Discourse Readability Of High School English Textbooks Based On Coh-Metrix Tool

Reading texts in English textbooks serve as important learning materials for teaching and learning activities in high school English classroom teaching,and their readability directly affects the cultivation of students’ reading ability.Readability,as an important indicator for evaluating whether a text is easy for learners to understand,can reflect whether it can comply with the requirements of coherent explicit and implicit double-sidedness under the premise of increasing difficulty in language knowledge.Based on this,the purpose of this study is to analyze the readability of high school English textbook reading texts and present the characteristics of readability changes,so as to provide reference value for the compiling of reading texts for high school English textbooks and related educators.In this study,the reading texts(a total of 80)in the compulsory volumes(eight volumes)of high school English textbooks in 2004 and 2019 versions published by the People Education Press were used as the source of the research samples.Readability analysis includes 8 dimensions: narrativity,syntactic simplicity,sytactic simplicity,referential cohesion,deep cohesion,verb cohesion,connectivity,and temporality.English language subjects(Language Arts)in Common Core State Standards(CCSS)of the United States were used as reference value,and the T test results conducted by statistical software SPSS are used to analyze the readability of the readability data between and within the new and old versions of textbook.The study found that,on a macro level,the readability analysis results of the texts in the two versions of the textbooks are not significantly different from the reference value of the main component of the readability evaluation index provided by CohMetrix and are in line with the high school segment divided by CCSS;From the perspective of specific evaluation indicators.In the old textbooks,the readability of the texts in the word concreteness,referential cohesion,verb cohesion,connectivity,and temporality is highly consistent with the reference value.The text readability of the new version of textbook is not significantly different from the reference value in terms of narrativity,word concreteness,deep cohesion,connectivity,and timeliness,and has higher consistency.The comparison shows that the reading texts of the old and new verisons of textbook are consistent in the three major indicators of vocabulary specificity,connectivity,and temporality.The other five indicators have significant differences among different volumes,showing the writing concepts and teaching goals of the new and old versions of textbook.The results show the differences of new and old versions of textbook in writing concepts,teaching goals,etc.In general,there are no significant changes in the readability between the two versions and within the volumes of the high school English textbooks,both the old and new version,at a relatively stable and consistent readability level.In order to further explore the value of the readability analysis of reading texts,the results of the difficulty analysis and the prediction results of the Flesh readability formula are used as a supplement to further verify the comprehensiveness and rationality of the readability analysis results.A total of 19 variables were extracted from the three analysis dimensions of Coh-Metrix: lexical diversity,syntactic complexity,and syntactic pattern density.The results showed that readability and difficulty reflect different characteristics of reading text from different levels of analysis.The readability analysis can more objectively and fully provide an evaluation basis for whether the reading text is beneficial to students’ understanding and the improvement of their reading level.At the same time,as the complexity of reading words and syntactic complexity in reading textbooks will not have a negative impact on their readability,the purpose and value of readability analysis are reflected from the side.In addition,the prediction results of the Flesh readability formula are significantly different from the Coh-Metrix measurement results,and they do not meet the segment of the referencial value.