Readability refers to how easily text can be understood. It is affected by factors like content familiarity, sentence length, vocabulary difficulty, and format. Readability formulas can estimate a text's reading level on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating easier text. When writing for low-literacy readers, authors should aim for a reading level at least two grades below the target audience's ability and use simple language, short sentences, clear organization, and visual cues to improve readability.
2. What is readability?
● the ease with which text can be read and
understood
● especially important for low-literacy students!
● Readability is not the same as legibility which is a
measure of how easily individual letters or
characters can be distinguished from each other.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
3. What factors affect readability?
Four main variables:
● content
● style
● format
● organization.
Content and style are the most important.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
4. Content and readability
● If the content is familiar, the reader can read
text at a higher level.
● Content that is unfamiliar to the reader must be
written at a more basic level to be readable.
● When introducing new content to the reader, start
with familiar ideas and show how the new
information fits with the old.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
5. Style and readability
Style includes:
● average sentence length
● number of different hard words
● number of personal pronouns*
● percentage of unique words.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
6. “Plain” or “Clear” Language
You can make your writing more readable by:
• Using language that is simple, direct, and familiar.
• Omitting needless words.
• Using sentence structures that are unambiguous.
• Organizing material in a logical way.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
7. How can you tell if a passage of text is too
difficult for your audience?
• One quick & easy way to get a ‘ballpark’ idea of how easy a
piece of text is to read is to use a ‘readability formula’
• There are many different readability formulas designed to
check reading ease of a piece of text.
• The Fernández-Huerta formula is designed to check reading
ease of Spanish text.
• Note that this will give you only a rough estimate of the
readability of your text!
Gina Bennett for COTR International
8. Try it!
If you have access to the internet, follow these steps to estimate the level of
readability of your text:
1. Locate a piece of text on the internet – something with mostly words,
2 or 3 paragraphs, (without much numerals, formulas, or lists)
2. Copy the text
3. Go to this website: http://www.standards-
schmandards.com/exhibits/rix/index.php
4. Paste the text in the space provided
5. Choose from the Method drop-down list ‘Flesch-Kincaid (English)’
6. Click on ‘Calculate score’
7. Note the result
Gina Bennett for COTR International
9. If you can’t access the internet…
Follow these steps:
1. Locate a piece of text – something with mostly words, 2 or 3 paragraphs,
(without much numerals, formulas, or lists)
2. Mark the beginning & end of your selection & count EVERY word in the
selection, even very short words.
3. Now count how many sentences are in the selection. If the selection ends
in the middle of a sentence, estimate the fraction of the sentence included
(e.g. 4.5 sentences)
4. Count how many syllables are in the selection.
5. Use this formula to estimate: 207 – (total words/total sentences) – 85
(total syllables/total words)
6. Note the result.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
10. Readability calculations: general guidelines
● In general, the higher the score, the easier the text is to read.
● a score of 100 would be ‘extremely easy’ while a score of 0 would
be ‘extremely difficult’ for English-speaking readers
● a score of 60 to 70 is considered the “normal range,” requiring an
eighth grade level
● a score of 75 means the text is “fairly easy”, requiring
approximately a fifth-grade level
● A score of less than 30 would probably require the equivalent of a
university degree to be readily understood.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
11. How can low readability score be
improved?
● Easiest way is to shorten the sentences.
Break each longer sentence into 2 (or more)
shorter sentences.
● use simpler, shorter words wherever
possible.
● But make sure that your changes do not
change the meaning significantly.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
12. What level should you aim for?
● reading for enjoyment: texts are ~ 2 grade levels lower
than reader’s actual reading level.
● When writing something important that you NEED
people to read, write it at least 2 levels lower than your
reader CAN read.
● If introducing new material, complex ideas, new
vocabulary, drop the reading level (unfamiliar
vocabulary pushes down the readability score).
Gina Bennett for COTR International
13. What is the reading level of your students?
How can you determine reading level?
1. determine last successfully completed grade
in school
2. test to determine current grade level
3. survey reading materials used within
learner’s community (posters, magazines,
manuals, graffiti)
Gina Bennett for COTR International
14. Format and readability: reading is work!
● It takes work to read!
● the close-ness of one word to another
matters
● Justification (full- vs. left-aligned) matters
-- especially for weak, less-experienced
readers.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
15. Visual cues help readability
● use left-aligned justification
● use upper- & lower-case letters (NOT all
upper-case)
● use shorter lines of text (<10 words per
line)
● add ‘white space’ (bulleted lists, etc.)
● add RELEVANT images
Gina Bennett for COTR International
16. Readability and organization
● Use shorter chapters (but not too
many headings & sub-headings &
sub-sub-headings etc., which
actually decrease readability).
Gina Bennett for COTR International
17. Learning to read or reading to learn?
● texts to help people learn to read are
different from those designed as ‘textbooks’
or manuals
● when teaching someone to read (or read
better) mix easy & more difficult pieces of
text.
Gina Bennett for COTR International
Hinweis der Redaktion
There’s a TONNE of good research indicating that learning works best when we start by focusing on the prior experience and knowledge that students bring with them. Instructors & curriculum developers know that when introducing a whole new concept, you start by engaging students’ prior knowledge on some topic that they know well & is connected in some way to the new concept. Then you can help them build their knowledge about the new concept.
Teaching via written instruction is very much the same. When you’re introducing a new topic in written materials start students on familiar ground.
What constitutes a ‘hard word’ varies from language to language. In English, a ‘hard word’ is any word longer than 3 syllables. But since Spanish has many more words with more than 2 syllables, a ‘hard word’ may be any word longer than 3 syllables.
In English, anyway, using a lot of personal pronouns (especially she & he) can lead to ambiguous writing if the reader is uncertain who the pronoun refers to. Spanish uses personal pronouns somewhat differently so I’m not sure whether this would be more (or less) of a problem in that language.
This sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many people, by trying to make their writing sound more ‘academic’, just make it sound more confusing!
Readability formulas are not rocket science/brain surgery instruments! There are so many factors, both physical & psychological, that contribute to whether or not a piece of text is easy to understand. But the Fernandez-Huerta test will give you a rough idea of your text’s reading ease, a sort of early warning if your writing is perhaps too complicated.
Note that there are many readability calculators & formulas out there. But a formula developed for English will give an inaccurate estimate for Spanish text because most Spanish has longer sentences & more syllables than a corresponding passage of text in English.
The Flesch-Kincaid formula is based on
206.84 – 1.015 (total words/total sentences) – 84.6 (total syllables/total words).
Note that you can choose other readability formulas developed specifically for other languages. For example, the Fernandez-Huerta formula is based on the Flesch-Kincaid but a bit different since an equivalent Spanish text excerpt will have more syllables than the same one in English.
Note that the Fernandez-Huerta formula is sometimes expressed as 206.84 - (0.60 * P) - (1.02 * F), but this older one is wrong (The reason is probably because Fernandez Huerta forgot to flip the last term) & even then only works when you use a sample of EXACTLY 100 words. Just in case this is expressed differently in Spanish: note that * = ‘multiplied by’