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.…

Text complexity has received increased attention due to the CCSS, which call for students to comprehend increasingly more complex texts as they progress through grades. Quantitative text complexity (or readability) indices are based on text attributes (e.g., sentence lengths, and lexical, syntactic, & semantic difficulty), quantified by…

This article investigates the lexical and discourse features of English text and discourse with automated computer technologies. Specifically, this article examines the cohesion of English text and discourse with automated computer tools, Coh-Metrix and TEES. Coh-Metrix is a text analysis computer tool that can analyze English text and discourse…

The purposes of this study were to identify the best predictor or predictors of paragraph comprehensibility and to attempt to interpret that predictor as a skill. Forty-two passages of differing readability (ranging from grade 2.5 to 10.0) were analyzed for within word, within sentence, and between sentence characteristics. The measures used for…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

In the writing of Matthew Arnold, integration, one great impression rather than many great individual lines, is the most important goal. In his essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," the "blocs" of his thought are in sets of two, three, or even four sentences: in effect, he writes much like a poet, in couplets,…

Reports on a classroom experiment testing the hypothesis that the distance across which readers must integrate information is a factor in reading comprehension. Concludes that secondary school students found it more difficult to resolve semantic relationships beyond the sentence than those within the sentence. (FL)

Explores the concept of ambiity in semantic relationships, and discusses several causes of relational ambiguity, including differing world views, subtext construction, and selective focusing. Asserts that while most instances of relational ambiguity do not impair text comprehension, readers should be aware of possible ambiguities. (MM)