A Study On Reading Discourse Readability Of Senior High School New Standard English Textbooks

Discourse is a crucial component of English textbooks,and its readability directly affects the development of students’ reading ability.Readability,as an important index to evaluate whether the text is easy for learners to understand,can reflect whether the English language can provide support for the development of students’ reading ability in form and meaning under the premise of increasing difficulty in language knowledge.The purpose of this study is to analyze the text readability of senior high school English textbook reading and to present the characteristics of readability changes in order to provide reference value for relevant educators.This study takes 96 reading texts from the New Standard English Textbook(8volumes)in 2004 and 2019 as the research samples.Using the Coh-Metrix 3.0 tool to analyze its readability,which includes narrative,syntactic simplicity,lexical specificity,referential cohesion,deep cohesion,verbal cohesion,connectivity,and temporality.Taking the Common Core State Standards(Language Arts K-12 Reading Text Readability Score)as the reference value and using SPSS to do one sample t-test to analyze the data of reading text readability between and within editions.It is found that the readability of reading texts in the two editions of the textbook is consistent with that provided by Coh-Metrix.There was no significant difference in the reference value of the principal component evaluation index,showing a high consistency of text readability,which in line with the CCSS division of senior high school.From the specific evaluation indicators,the text readability results of the 2004 version in terms of syntactic simplicity,word concreteness,referential cohesion,connectivity,and temporality are consistent with the reference values.There is no significant difference in all indicators between the 2019 version and the reference value.The reading texts of two versions are consistent in terms of word concreteness,referential cohesion,deep cohesion,connectivity,and temporality.The other three indicators have significant differences in different volumes,showing the influence of compilation ideas and teaching objectives on the design and selection of reading texts.In general,the readability of two versions of senior High School English textbooks has no significant change between books and editions,maintaining a stable and consistent level.In order to further explore the value of readability analysis,the results of difficulty analysis is used as a supplement to verify the comprehensiveness and rationality of the results.This paper extracts 19 variables from Coh-Metrix in terms of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,and syntactic pattern density to analyze the reading difficulty.The results show that readability and difficulty reflect different features of the text from different analysis levels,and readability analysis can more objectively and fully evaluate whether the text is conducive to students’ comprehension and the improvement of reading level.At the same time,with the increase of word complexity and syntactic complexity in reading texts,it will not have a negative impact on readability,which reflects the purpose and value of readability analysis.Based on the analysis of the research results,the author gives some implications for high school English reading teaching: first,teachers can choose articles suitable for students at different levels before reading;secondly,teachers can use the discourse analysis to help students to construct the consciousness of discourse during the reading process,and promote the development of logical thinking ability in this process;Besides,teachers can identify where students have reading difficulties according to readability analysis and provide corresponding guidance.