Unfolding models are frequently used to develop scales for measuring attitudes. Recently, unfolding models have been applied to examine rater severity and accuracy within the context of rater-mediated assessments. One of the problems in applying unfolding models to rater-mediated assessments is that the substantive interpretations of the latent…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine student sentiments regarding high-quality vs low-quality teaching. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a text mining technique to identify the positive and negative patterns of student sentiments from student evaluations of teaching (SET) provided on Ratemyprofessors.com. After identifying…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

Reading texts may serve as a vital source of informational content and language knowledge for second language (L2) learners, which is known as the dual relevance of L2 reading (Han & D'Angelo, 2009). Text complexity, however, influences the two, determining to a great extent whether the dual outcome is attainable. Drawing on Complex Dynamic…

The number of minutes appended in headlines serves as a signpost for readers regarding the reading time. Being the first on Minute News, this present quantitative study reports the results from comparative analyses of text contents of one-to-five Minute News published by one Philippine and one American media outlet in November 2018. Selected…

Comparing language tests and test preparation materials holds important implications for the latter's validity and reliability. However, not enough studies compare such materials across a wide range of indices. Therefore, this study investigated the text complexity of IELTS academic reading tests (IRT) and IELTS reading practice tests (IRPrT).…

The importance of input on language learning cannot be overstated. One method of providing input to learners at a level that is appropriate for them is called extensive reading, in which learners read an abundance of texts. In practice, for learners of English as a second or foreign language, these texts are often books that have been written and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the continuity of reading passages of Korean high school English textbooks with the 2015 Revised National Curriculum using CohMetrix, a software that analyzes English texts in a range of linguistic features. Twentyone English textbooks were analyzed: 11 High School English, five High School English I,…

The widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for raising the level of text complexity in textbooks and reading materials used by students across all grade levels in the United States; the authors of the English Language Arts component of the CCSS build their case for higher complexity in part upon a research base they say shows a…

Computational tools and resources play an important role for vocabulary acquisition. Although a large variety of dictionaries and learning games are available, few resources provide information about the complexity of a word, either for learning or for comprehension. The idea here is to use frequency counts combined with intralexical variables to…

Although a reader's text-level comprehension is affected by the comprehension of individual sentences in a text, little attention has been paid to the difficulty of sentences. This study investigates whether measures (features) of text difficulty affect the "gradience" observed in sentence difficulty judgments. We examine two traditional…

This study investigates differences in the language and discourse characteristics of course blogs and traditional academic submissions produced in English by native (L1) and advanced second language (L2) writers. One hundred and fifty-two texts generated by 38 graduate students within the context of the same Master's level course were analysed…

The "TextEvaluator"® text analysis tool is a fully automated text complexity evaluation tool designed to help teachers, curriculum specialists, textbook publishers, and test developers select texts that are consistent with the text complexity guidelines specified in the Common Core State Standards.This paper documents the procedure used…

Reading materials are considered having high readability if readers are interested to read the materials, understand the content of the materials and able to read the materials fluently. In contrast, reading materials with low readability discourage readers from reading the materials, create difficulties for readers to understand the content of…

This paper considers whether the sources of linguistic complexity presented within texts targeted at 1st-grade readers have increased, decreased, or held steady over the 52-year period from 1962 to 2013. A collection of more than 450 texts is examined. All texts were selected from Grade 1 textbooks published by Scott Foresman during the targeted…