THE MEASUREMENT OF TEXT’S READABILITY
Muhammad Farkhan (
[email protected])
Abstract The selection of authentic and non-authentic reading texts used as learning materials becomes the paramount importance to develop the students’ language proficiency. This selection relies on a quantitative analysis of texts’ readability using certain formulas designed to know whether the text is really relevant and appropriate to the learners’ ability. This analysis makes use of cloze-test to get the data needed. In addition, it is also necessary to analysis the text qualitatively to see some cultural aspects that underlie the text’s content, so that the teachers will be able to decide to use the texts as learning materials or not. Key words:
readability
cloze-test
measurement
A. Introduction English as an international language plays important role in many fields of human lives. It is used to express ideas, feeling, business transaction, and negotiation; to build relationship among nations bilaterally or multilaterally; and to develop or transfer science and technology. Without English mastery, especially in this era of globalization, the people or nation will be left behind. If they want to be involved in those fields, they have to master English well. Realizing the importance of English, the government has determined that English is the first foreign language taught at schools and university as a compulsory subject or as a major. Its main objective is to develop the students’ ability to use English in oral and written communication. It can be said the students are required to acquire communicative competence. Of course, the teaching of this language covers its four aspects: language skills, language components, culture, and literary works, which are presented in an integrated classroom activity (Pusat Kurikulum, 2002: 6). The activity can be conducted well if learning materials, either authentic or non-authentic ones, facilitate it. The choice of authentic and non-authentic materials, especially reading texts that will be used in the classroom is sometimes a matter for some teachers. They have to choose reading texts appropriate to the students’ level. The texts that are too far beyond their level will make them frustrated to understand because of the difficult vocabularies and sentence patterns they contain; so they become unmotivated to learn
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English. Meanwhile, if the texts are under their level they will make them overconfident to comprehend; so they lead them to underestimate what is going to be given. Therefore, the texts used by the teachers should conform to their level or should be slightly beyond their level. In other words, the texts should contain the appropriate vocabularies and grammatical rules suitable for the themes and topics to be determined on the basis of students’ interest and stages of development (Huda, 1999: 119). The suitability of the texts with the level of the students is commonly known as readability. It is one of the important factors that influence the students to comprehend the texts used to develop their English proficiency. It is a hard duty for the teachers to provide the appropriate texts, as they have to measure and analyze the texts that will be used. Mostly the analysis is focused only on their linguistic aspects, like lexical and grammatical contents. The analysis will yield a clear description of their readability if they are supplemented by a cultural content. B. The Definition of Reading In everyday lives, reading plays important role for human being from the ancient era to this era of globalization. Through reading and writing human beings are able to transfer what they know to the others, so that they become well informed with various information related not only to their lives but also to other creatures’ lives. Reading is one of the four language skills that should be developed by the teachers in teaching English as a foreign language. Reading has an important priority if compared with the other skills, not only because it helps the people get information and new technology, it is also a complex process. It is influenced by a variety of factors, such as experiential and conceptual backgrounds; word recognition strategies; reasoning abilities; purposes of reading; situation in which reading takes place; motivation; and the complexity of the text. To understand what reading means, it’s would be better if we know and study various definitions given by the experts. According to Nuttal, reading is the process of decoding the written text encoded by the writer (1987:4). It informs us that in reading, someone has to try to understand the idea or thought of the writer through the written text. Of course he has to be familiar with the words and grammars used in the text, which govern to be sentences and paragraphs. Supporting this idea, Harmer defines reading as an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain. The eyes receive messages and the brain then has to work out the significance of these messages (1991: 190). It denotes that reading is a complex skill involving identifying graphic symbols and translating into meaningful messages or thoughts done in the mind of the readers. It can be said that if the eyes fail to identify the symbols, the brain will get difficulties in transferring the messages. To help the brain do its tasks in reading, someone has to use his previous knowledge. Concerning with this, Grellet says that reading is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it (1981: 7). It is obviously clear that the previous knowledge of the readers plays important role in comprehending the text.
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Reading is not a passive activity but it also involves a complex process that must always be actively initiated and directed by the reader. He is not passive recipient of massage from the printed materials, but he must predict if that is to comprehend all about reading text. The processes that usually take place when someone reads a text, according to Heaton (1995: 106), are the specific skills involved in comprehending the text. There are too many specific skills of reading, among of them are: 1. recognizing words and word groups associating sounds with their corresponding graphic symbols; 2. deducing meaning of words by understanding word formation or contextual clues; 3. understanding explicitly stated information; 4. understanding relations within the sentences; 5. skimming and scanning; and 6. understanding information not explicitly stated. Harris classifies the processes, which he called the abilities in reading, into three main aspects: language and graphic symbols; ideas; and tone and style. The first Involves comprehending a large percentage of lexical items; understanding the syntactical patterns and morphological forms; and responding to graphic symbols of writing. The second includes identifying the central idea and its subordinate ideas; and drawing correct conclusion. The third covers recognizing author’s attitude toward the subject and identifying methods and stylistic devices (1969:59). All of the processes or the skills should be well mastered by senior high school and university students. In order to help students comprehend the written material in the texts being used, the teachers should give them such knowledge and ability to be able to reading material with ease and enjoyment. With their guidance, the students should be able to turn to books freely with a feeling of pleasure. However, there should be a priority to be achieved by the students according to the level where they are in. Referring to the explanation above, the writer defines reading skill as the active processes of comprehending the written materials involving not only the graphic symbols but also the massages conveyed by those symbols. C. Readability As a good teacher of English, someone has to try to run the teaching and learning activities in the classroom effectively and efficiently. Therefore, he/she has to provide the students with materials in order to help them meet the objectives of learning determined before. According to Tomlinson (1998: 4), materials refer to anything, which is used by teachers or students to facilitate learning of a language. They could be cassettes, videos, CD room, readers, textbooks, workbooks, or photocopied exercises. Concerning with the development of reading skills, of course the teacher is required to provide the students with learning materials, a textbook or literary works. Actually, preparing such learning materials by the teachers themselves is a hard work for them, because they need not only special capability but also plenty
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of time to prepare their own materials. So, they can select the textbooks or literary works available in the market as long as they fulfil the following characteristics: 1. They emphasize the communicative functions of language; 2. They try to reflect the students’ needs and interests; 3. They emphasize skills in using the language; 4. They usually have a good balance among the four language skills; 5. They tend to be very specific in their definition of aims; 6. Both content and methods reflect the authentic language of everyday life (Grant, 1987: 14). Besides those characteristics, in preparing the textbook or reading texts the teacher has to pay attention to three other characteristics as suggested by Nuttall. They are readability, suitability of content, and exploitability (1987: 25). Related to the topic being discussed, the writer tends to discuss more about the readability of the texts. This term is closely related to the reading activity, especially to the text or the passages used as the materials of teaching and learning process both inside and outside the classroom. Lexically, the word “readability is derived from the root word “read” and two suffixes “able” and “ty”, which mean being able to be read. .It can be said if the text is readable or if someone can read the text and comprehend the message conveyed, it means it can be read and so that it has readability. Terminologically, the definitions of readability given by the experts are various because of the different points of view. To understand comprehensively, the writer presents some of them having the same idea as in the following discussion. Smith and King define readability as the difficulty level of reading materials (1988: 3). It implies that readability is dealt with the degree or level of the difficulty of the reading materials being used in the classroom. While according to Karlin (1984: 99), readability refers to the suitability between the reading ability and difficulty of materials. Both definitions still point out the general aspect of difficulty. They do not specify the difficulty, whether it is about the vocabularies used by the writers, whether it is about the structures or sentence patterns, which govern the vocabularies to sentences and paragraphs, or about the conceptual contents of the materials. Still discussing about the readability, Nuttall says that it is about the linguistic difficulty, especially with the lexical and structural elements of the reading text. Further, she says: Obviously a text should be at the right level of difficulty for the students, but assessing the right level is not straightforward. Our concern here is with linguistic difficulty only, ignoring for the moment the questions of conceptual difficulty and interest. The combination of structural and lexical difficulty is readability (1987: 25). Based on the explanation above, it can be said that readability is the degree or level of difficulty of the lexical and structural components of the reading materials or texts. Actually the difficulty of the text is very relative to the students reading ability. Their skills in analyzing the structural elements, predicting the meaning of the
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difficult vocabularies based on their context; in scanning or skimming the information; and looking for the detailed information; influence the students ability in comprehending the text. The students’ ability to understand the content of the reading depends also on their ability to see the relation of one part to the other in a sentence or paragraph. It denotes that the readability of the reading materials can not be separated from the students’ ability to understand it, and their ability to understand the text depends on the reading material itself. Therefore; it is possible to say that the reading materials will have the appropriate level of difficulty or readability if the readers can understand most of the message being conveyed by the vocabularies and the structural elements of the text. They will have less readability if the students fail to catch most of the massage intended by the writer of the texts. Such readability makes uses of the linguistic aspects of the text as their criteria. They may lead to a bias difficulty level if its nonlinguistic aspect, such as their cultural background is left unanalyzed. Knowing most vocabularies and grammatical contents does not guarantee someone to understand most of the messages intended by the author. He needs to understand the cultural background where the linguistic aspects appear. Therefore, readability is dependent on both linguistic and nonlinguistic factors. D. The Measurement of Readability As discussed before, there are only two components of the reading materials that affect its readability: its vocabularies and structural difficulty. Both linguistic elements are basis to design the measurement of readability. Moreover, there are also other components of the text that influence its readability such as cultural background and ideational complexity, which are more difficult to measure as they need to be qualitatively analyzed. Related to this readability measurement, there are some well-known applicable methods that can be used. They are grouped into two. The first methods, which are illustrated by numerous readability formulas, are based on length of words or vocabularies and length of sentences; the second is based upon the predictability of words in a passage, which usually make use of a simple word deletion procedure (Smith and King, 1988: 3). Here are the formulas compiled from various resources; the first seven formulas are based on the length of words and sentences, while the last one is based on the predictability of words in a passage (Karlin, 1984: 96-99). 1. Index Number (Wheeler and Smith) 2. Grade Level Score (Spache) 3. Reading Ease Score (Flesch) 4. Fog Formula (Gunning) 5. The Readability Nomograph (Fry) 6. Grade Placement Score (Lorge) 7. SMOG Index (McLaughlin) 8. Cloze Technique (Taylor).
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Of eight techniques above cloze technique formula is easier and more simpler than the others. The determination of difficult words and sentences in the previous formulas are dependent on the tester’s knowledge and assumption; while in Cloze technique such determination is not found, because difficult words and sentences of the text are judged by the students themselves. So it seems fairer and more objective. This test may employ fill-in the blank type, multiple choice type, or matching test type. In this research the writer adopts fill-in the blank type test. The cloze technique has emerged recently as an alternative measurement for testing comprehension of the more specifically linguistic elements in a text. The test usually takes the form of Fill in the blank type, with the different underlining principles. The first principle is that the test is based upon the Gestalt theory of closure which refers to the tendency that people have in viewing structure as wholes (Heaton, 1988: 16). The second principle is that the deletion of words should be done systematically or mechanically (Weir,1993: 81). This suggests that the deletion of words is not conducted randomly or arbitrarily, but it should be done according to a certain rule. Usually, the rule that is employed is that every n-th word (for example every fifth, sixth, or seventh word) should be deleted. The interval at which words are deleted should not be too short: e.g. every third or forth words; or too long; e. g. every eighth or even tenth words. Too short interval causes the students difficult to comprehend the passage because the context is not so clear enough; while too long interval not only requires the teacher to look for long passage but also makes the students easy to understand because the context become clearer. By applying this rule, the tester has no chance to concentrate only on deleting nouns, or verbs, or any other word classes. In this aspect, lies the difference between the cloze test and the other Fill in the blank types which are extremely subjective. The following is an extract from an advanced level cloze passage in which every seventh word has been deleted (adopted from Heaton). The mark assigned to a student _____ surrounded by an area of uncertainty _____ is the cumulative effect of a _____ of sampling errors. One sample of _____ students’ behaviors is exhibited on one _____ one occasion in response to one sample _____set by one sample of examiners _____ possibly marked by one other. Each _____ the sampling errors is almost insignificant _____ itself. However, when each sampling error _____ added to others, the total _____ of possible sampling errors becomes significant. The third principle is redundancy, that is the extent to which words are predictable. (Smith and King, 1988: 14). It is dealt with the provision of information by more than one source. The redundancy may be realized through various types of elements, such as repetition, synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, examples, definition, details, comparison, etc. The readers can take some advantages of those elements when they reconstruct the writers’ idea or try to understand the missing words. They may catch the meaning of the missing words when they find the examples given, repetitions and so on.
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In addition to the previous principles, the teachers have to take into account which parts of the books or works are taken as samples of the test. Usually the initial, middle, and final part of the book are used as sample of the test. This coverage of the texts is assumed to reflect the real index of difficulty. It the test contains only certain parts of the book, for example from the initial part, the readability of the book is still questionable, for some parts of the book are not represented adequately. The test may be too easy or difficult for the testees. Readability of the texts is not only a matter of comparing the readers’ responses with the original form of the text, but it also concerns with comparing the average score with certain criteria to judge the level of difficulty of the text. In scoring the students’ responses, Heaton (1988: 16) suggests that there are two methods of scoring a cloze test: one mark may be awarded for each acceptable answer or else one mark may be awarded for each exact answer. Both methods have been found reliable. Therefore, it is reliable means of determining whether or not certain texts are at an appropriate level for particular group of students. In judging the level of readability, the teacher may adopt the criteria introduced by Heaton: 1) independent level; 2) instructional level; and 3) frustrational level. The independent level indicates that the students will not get problems in reading, they can read the passage easily. The instructional level shows that the material of reading can be used as source of developing reading comprehension; while the frustrational level shows that the text is very difficult and not appropriate to be used as source for developing reading comprehension. Further he says If the mean score of the group is over 53%, the materials can be used by the students for reading at the independent level, the text being considered easy enough for students to read on their own without any help. If the mean score obtained is between 44% and 53%, the material is suitable for use at the instructional level, with the help of teacher. If the mean score is below 44%, the text is described as being at the frustrational level and should not be used even with the help of the teacher (1988: 131-2). Before using the criteria, the teachers have to count first the number of deleted words and use them to get the percentage of individual right responses, and the average percentage of the group. If the test contains three passages with 200 deleted words, the student who answers 100 items rightly will get 50%. Then, this whole individuals’ percentage are calculated to get the average percentage of the group. If the group obtains 20% and is compared to the criteria above, it will fall below 44%. It means the text in at frustrational level or it needs more teachers’ guidance. To simplify the explanation of the readability level as given by Heaton, and to make it easier to judge the readability level of the reading materials of the textbook, the criteria of it is presented in Table 1. If the score has already obtained, the text should be qualitatively analyzed in term of it cultural background. This analysis makes it more reliable to judge whether the text has the appropriate level of difficulty or not. Table 1 Criteria of readability Level
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Mean Score (%)
Remark
Over 53% Between 44% - 53% Below 44%
Independent Level Instructional Level Frustrational Level
Referring to the discussion above, the writer can formulate the procedures of using cloze technique to measure the readability of reading materials as follows: 1. Select one passage from the initial, middle, and final parts of the textbook; 2. Determine the n-th words being deleted, the fifth, sixth, or seventh; 3. Rewrite the text containing some missing words; 4. Ask the students to fill in the blank; 5. Count up the correct insertions and compare the passage; and 6. Determine the criteria reached by the average score. 7. Determine the level of readability; 8. Analyzing the text seen from its the cultural aspect. E. Conclusion Referring to the previous discussion, the writer is able to conclude the textbooks or other literary works used as learning materials should be quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed to obtain the real level of their difficulty. Too difficult texts tend to discourage the students to learn; and too easy texts tend to make them bored and uninterested. References Huda, Nuril. 1999. Language Learning and Teaching, Malang: IKIP Malang Publisher Nuttal, Christine. 1987. Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. London: Heinemann Educational Books. Harmer, Jeremy. 1991. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman. Grallet, Francoise. 1981. Developing Reading Skills. Cambridge: CPU. Heaton, J. B. 1995. Writing English Language Tests. London: Longman, Harris, David P. 1969. Testing English as a second language. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company..
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Pusat kurikulum, Diknas 2002. Kurikulum Berbasis Kompetensi. Jakarta: Pusat Kurikulum Tomlinson, Brain. 1998. Materials Development in a Language Teaching. (Cambridge: CPU, 1998), p.4 Grant, Nevile. 1987. Making The Most of Your Textbooks. London: Longman, M Judith. Smith and Wayne A. King. 1988. Readability Michigan: Ulrih’s Books, Karlin, Robert. 1984. Teaching Reading in High School. New York: Harper & Row Publisher, Weir, Cyril. 1993. Understanding and Developing Language Tests. New York: Prentice Hall.
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