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.…

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…

Reports on an investigation of the effect of syntax on the comprehension of written English by Thai college students who have studied English as a foreign language. (HOD)

Outlines a study to determine similarities between language structures in English reading materials and oral language patterns familiar to Filipino children and mentions needs for readability studies of second-language materials. Bibliography. (MD)

The effect on reading comprehension of manipulating the degree of sentence combining in a passage was assessed for college students and eighth graders. It was found that lower readability level material, as measured by common readability formulas, does not facilitate comprehension for either group, and may actually impede it. (Author/MSE)

Both sentence length and sentence complexity of various kinds of newspaper prose were examined in a study to determine (1) ways newspaper prose differs from the prose of books native English speaking students chose to read and enjoy reading and (2) whether there are features of newspaper prose other than vocabulary and a lack of international news…

To estimate reading difficulty of items on a sentence repetition task, a study had 50 adult English as a second language (ESL) students repeat each of 26 sentences immediately after two presentations. High-difficulty items were derivationally more complex than low-difficulty items, and the most difficult items involved the processing of…