Cloze items are a foundational approach to assessing readability. However, they require human data collection, thus making them impractical in automated metrics. The present study revisits the idea of assessing readability with cloze items and compares human cloze scores and readability judgments with predictions made by T5, a popular deep…

This study explores the writing quality of two AI chatbots, OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The research assesses the quality of the generated texts based on five essay models using the T.E.R.A. software, focusing on ease of understanding, readability, and reading levels using the Flesch-Kincaid formula. Thirty essays were generated, 15 from…

Forty anatomy articles were sampled from English Wikipedia and assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, each article's edit history was analyzed by Wikipedia X-tools, references and media were counted manually, and two readability indices were used to evaluate article readability. This analysis revealed that each article was…

Assessment of text readability is important for assigning texts at the appropriate level to readers at different proficiency levels. The present research approached readability assessment from the lexical perspective of word frequencies derived from corpora assumed to reflect typical language experience. Three studies were conducted to test how…

Estimating the difficulty of reading tests is critical in second language education and assessment. This study was aimed at examining various text features that might influence the difficulty level of a high-stakes reading comprehension test and predict test takers' scores. To this end, the responses provided by 17,900 test takers on the reading…

Nowadays, text readability is of great importance. Simple but very often ignored, readability statistics can provide information about the level of difficulty of the readability of particular documents and increase an evaluator's credibility. Hence, this research aims to examine the readability index of the test instrument for BIPA (Bahasa…

Though the empirical findings of the past studies in the literature have offered strong support to the significant role of language knowledge and background knowledge in reading comprehension, this issue has not been explored with regard to specific purposes tests in the Iranian higher education context. Therefore, this study aimed at exploring…

Reading comprehension instruction may be critical for students to learn from social studies text, particularly for students who are not yet proficient in reading. Understanding factors that correspond to high levels of student engagement during text-based social studies instruction appears particularly important. Data were collected from 50…

We compared high school students' performance in a traditional comprehension assessment requiring them to identify key information and draw inferences from single texts, and a scenario-based assessment (SBA) requiring them to integrate, evaluate and apply information across multiple sources. Both assessments focused on a non-academic topic.…

In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Background: The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (USDHHS) recommends that health material be written at or below a sixth-grade reading level to ensure readability. Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the readability of online smoking cessation materials from several government and voluntary health organizations.…

In this mixed method study I evaluated the relationship between teachers' perceptions of text complexity and data of text complexity assessed by standard and non-standard measures in the disciplines of English Language Arts (ELA), science, and social studies. For the quantitative portion of this study, I evaluated and correlated the text…

Metadiscourse is a tool for writers to guide and interact with readers through texts. Yet in most student texts, one of the points lacking is the interaction between writers and readers. In this study, frequency and type of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features were explored via students' research-based essays based on Hyland's…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…