The purpose of this book is to introduce the research on readability, defined here as reading ease. The first part of the book covers how people read. A series of national literacy surveys show that the average person in the U.S. and most other countries are adults of limited reading skills. For example, the average adult in the U.S. reads at the…

Proposes that prediction and production variables used together tap both text and reader factors and provide a much improved analysis of readability. Finds that this kind of analysis will lead to more specific kinds of pedagogical strategies for teaching writing. (MS)

This article discusses how text variables interact with reader, strategy, and task variables to affect readability, including text coherence, text organization, signaling, and text structure. It considers how classic readability formulas, in concert with consideration of text, text reader, and strategy variables, can be used to match texts to…

Readability formulas applied to materials for hearing-impaired students do not account for important factors in reader-writer-text interaction. Factors include the reader's purpose, cultural background, and extent of background knowledge; writers' assumptions about readers; the text's structure, content, and cohesion; and the role of…

The problems arising from treating word and sentence complexity as the direct causes of difficulty in comprehension are surveyed in this paper from the perspective of readability formulas. The basic choices and assumptions made in the development and use of readability formulas are discussed in relation to the larger question of text…

This article discusses the reading fluency and comprehension problems of struggling secondary students who can read, with assistance, on a fourth-grade reading level or above. Difficulties with vocabulary and sentence construction are described, along with problems with pronoun reference and noun substitutions, metaphor, and conventions of print.…

This article explores the relationships between vocabulary knowledge and text readability. It discusses how procedures used by readability formulas to assess the vocabulary factor can over- or underestimate text difficulty by counting syllables rather than assessing what the reader knows about the words in a text. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)