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THE MEASUREMENT OF TEXT’S READABILITY

Muhammad Farkhan(muhammadfarkhan@gmail.com)

Abstract

The selection of authentic and non-authentic reading texts used as learningmaterials becomes the paramount importance to develop the students’ languageproficiency. This selection relies on a quantitative analysis of texts’ readability usingcertain formulas designed to know whether the text is really relevant and appropriateto 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 culturalaspects that underlie the text’s content, so that the teachers will be able to decide touse the texts as learning materials or not.

Key words: readability cloze-test measurement

A. IntroductionEnglish 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 ortransfer science and technology. Without English mastery, especially in this era ofglobalization, the people or nation will be left behind. If they want to be involved inthose fields, they have to master English well.

Realizing the importance of English, the government has determined that Englishis the first foreign language taught at schools and university as a compulsory subjector as a major. Its main objective is to develop the students’ ability to use English inoral and written communication. It can be said the students are required to acquirecommunicative competence. Of course, the teaching of this language covers its fouraspects: language skills, language components, culture, and literary works, which arepresented in an integrated classroom activity (Pusat Kurikulum, 2002: 6). The activitycan 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 thatwill be used in the classroom is sometimes a matter for some teachers. They have tochoose reading texts appropriate to the students’ level. The texts that are too farbeyond their level will make them frustrated to understand because of the difficultvocabularies 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 themoverconfident to comprehend; so they lead them to underestimate what is going to begiven. Therefore, the texts used by the teachers should conform to their level orshould be slightly beyond their level. In other words, the texts should contain theappropriate vocabularies and grammatical rules suitable for the themes and topics tobe 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 knownas readability. It is one of the important factors that influence the students tocomprehend the texts used to develop their English proficiency. It is a hard duty forthe teachers to provide the appropriate texts, as they have to measure and analyze thetexts 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 oftheir readability if they are supplemented by a cultural content.

B. The Definition of ReadingIn 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 totransfer what they know to the others, so that they become well informed with variousinformation 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 inteaching English as a foreign language. Reading has an important priority ifcompared with the other skills, not only because it helps the people get informationand new technology, it is also a complex process. It is influenced by a variety offactors, 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 studyvarious definitions given by the experts. According to Nuttal, reading is the processof decoding the written text encoded by the writer (1987:4). It informs us that inreading, someone has to try to understand the idea or thought of the writer throughthe written text. Of course he has to be familiar with the words and grammars used inthe text, which govern to be sentences and paragraphs. Supporting this idea, Harmerdefines reading as an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain. The eyes receivemessages 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 graphicsymbols and translating into meaningful messages or thoughts done in the mind of thereaders. It can be said that if the eyes fail to identify the symbols, the brain will getdifficulties 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 thatreading is a constant process of guessing, and what one brings to the text is oftenmore important than what one finds in it (1981: 7). It is obviously clear that theprevious 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 thatmust always be actively initiated and directed by the reader. He is not passiverecipient of massage from the printed materials, but he must predict if that is tocomprehend all about reading text. The processes that usually take place whensomeone reads a text, according to Heaton (1995: 106), are the specific skillsinvolved in comprehending the text. There are too many specific skills of reading,among of them are:

1. recognizing words and word groups associating sounds withtheir corresponding graphic symbols;

2. deducing meaning of words by understanding word formationor contextual clues;

3. understanding explicitly stated information;4. understanding relations within the sentences;5. skimming and scanning; and6. 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 firstInvolves comprehending a large percentage of lexical items; understanding thesyntactical patterns and morphological forms; and responding to graphic symbols ofwriting. The second includes identifying the central idea and its subordinate ideas;and drawing correct conclusion. The third covers recognizing author’s attitude towardthe subject and identifying methods and stylistic devices (1969:59).All of the processes or the skills should be well mastered by senior high school anduniversity students. In order to help students comprehend the written material in thetexts being used, the teachers should give them such knowledge and ability to be ableto reading material with ease and enjoyment. With their guidance, the students shouldbe able to turn to books freely with a feeling of pleasure. However, there should be apriority 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 theactive processes of comprehending the written materials involving not only thegraphic symbols but also the massages conveyed by those symbols.

C. ReadabilityAs 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 hasto provide the students with materials in order to help them meet the objectives oflearning determined before. According to Tomlinson (1998: 4), materials refer toanything, which is used by teachers or students to facilitate learning of a language.They could be cassettes, videos, CD room, readers, textbooks, workbooks, orphotocopied exercises. Concerning with the development of reading skills, of coursethe teacher is required to provide the students with learning materials, a textbook orliterary works. Actually, preparing such learning materials by the teachers themselvesis 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 literaryworks 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 aboutthe 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 learningprocess both inside and outside the classroom. Lexically, the word “readability isderived from the root word “read” and two suffixes “able” and “ty”, which meanbeing able to be read. .It can be said if the text is readable or if someone can read thetext and comprehend the message conveyed, it means it can be read and so that it hasreadability. Terminologically, the definitions of readability given by the experts arevarious because of the different points of view. To understand comprehensively, thewriter 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 difficultyof the reading materials being used in the classroom. While according to Karlin(1984: 99), readability refers to the suitability between the reading ability anddifficulty 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 thewriters, whether it is about the structures or sentence patterns, which govern thevocabularies to sentences and paragraphs, or about the conceptual contents of thematerials. Still discussing about the readability, Nuttall says that it is about thelinguistic difficulty, especially with the lexical and structural elements of the readingtext. Further, she says:Obviously a text should be at the right level of difficulty for the students, butassessing the right level is not straightforward. Our concern here is withlinguistic difficulty only, ignoring for the moment the questions of conceptualdifficulty and interest. The combination of structural and lexical difficulty isreadability (1987: 25).

Based on the explanation above, it can be said that readability is the degree orlevel of difficulty of the lexical and structural components of the reading materials ortexts. 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 theinformation; and looking for the detailed information; influence the students ability incomprehending the text.

The students’ ability to understand the content of the reading depends also ontheir ability to see the relation of one part to the other in a sentence or paragraph. Itdenotes that the readability of the reading materials can not be separated from thestudents’ ability to understand it, and their ability to understand the text depends onthe reading material itself. Therefore; it is possible to say that the reading materialswill have the appropriate level of difficulty or readability if the readers canunderstand most of the message being conveyed by the vocabularies and thestructural elements of the text. They will have less readability if the students fail tocatch most of the massage intended by the writer of the texts. Such readability makesuses of the linguistic aspects of the text as their criteria. They may lead to a biasdifficulty level if its nonlinguistic aspect, such as their cultural background is leftunanalyzed. Knowing most vocabularies and grammatical contents does notguarantee someone to understand most of the messages intended by the author. Heneeds 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 materialsthat affect its readability: its vocabularies and structural difficulty. Both linguisticelements are basis to design the measurement of readability. Moreover, there are alsoother components of the text that influence its readability such as cultural backgroundand ideational complexity, which are more difficult to measure as they need to bequalitatively analyzed. Related to this readability measurement, there are some well-knownapplicable 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 wordsor vocabularies and length of sentences; the second is based upon the predictability ofwords 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 lastone 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 simplerthan the others. The determination of difficult words and sentences in the previousformulas are dependent on the tester’s knowledge and assumption; while in Clozetechnique such determination is not found, because difficult words and sentences ofthe 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 testtype. In this research the writer adopts fill-in the blank type test.The cloze technique has emerged recently as an alternative measurement for testingcomprehension of the more specifically linguistic elements in a text. The test usuallytakes the form of Fill in the blank type, with the different underlining principles. Thefirst principle is that the test is based upon the Gestalt theory of closure which refersto the tendency that people have in viewing structure as wholes (Heaton, 1988: 16).

The second principle is that the deletion of words should be donesystematically or mechanically (Weir,1993: 81). This suggests that the deletion ofwords is not conducted randomly or arbitrarily, but it should be done according to acertain rule. Usually, the rule that is employed is that every n-th word (for exampleevery fifth, sixth, or seventh word) should be deleted. The interval at which words aredeleted 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 tocomprehend the passage because the context is not so clear enough; while too longinterval not only requires the teacher to look for long passage but also makes thestudents easy to understand because the context become clearer. By applying thisrule, the tester has no chance to concentrate only on deleting nouns, or verbs, or anyother word classes. In this aspect, lies the difference between the cloze test and theother Fill in the blank types which are extremely subjective. The following is anextract from an advanced level cloze passage in which every seventh word has beendeleted (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 responseto one sample _____set by one sample of examiners _____ possibly markedby 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 morethan 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 theyreconstruct the writers’ idea or try to understand the missing words. They may catchthe meaning of the missing words when they find the examples given, repetitions andso on.

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In addition to the previous principles, the teachers have to take into accountwhich 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 thetexts is assumed to reflect the real index of difficulty. It the test contains only certainparts of the book, for example from the initial part, the readability of the book is stillquestionable, for some parts of the book are not represented adequately. The test maybe 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 theaverage score with certain criteria to judge the level of difficulty of the text. Inscoring the students’ responses, Heaton (1988: 16) suggests that there are twomethods of scoring a cloze test: one mark may be awarded for each acceptableanswer or else one mark may be awarded for each exact answer. Both methods havebeen found reliable. Therefore, it is reliable means of determining whether or notcertain texts are at an appropriate level for particular group of students.

In judging the level of readability, the teacher may adopt the criteriaintroduced by Heaton: 1) independent level; 2) instructional level; and 3) frustrationallevel. The independent level indicates that the students will not get problems inreading, they can read the passage easily. The instructional level shows that thematerial 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 tobe used as source for developing reading comprehension. Further he says If the meanscore of the group is over 53%, the materials can be used by the students for readingat the independent level, the text being considered easy enough for students to read ontheir own without any help. If the mean score obtained is between 44% and 53%, thematerial is suitable for use at the instructional level, with the help of teacher. If themean score is below 44%, the text is described as being at the frustrational level andshould not be used even with the help of the teacher (1988: 131-2). Before using thecriteria, the teachers have to count first the number of deleted words and use them toget the percentage of individual right responses, and the average percentage of thegroup. If the test contains three passages with 200 deleted words, the student whoanswers 100 items rightly will get 50%. Then, this whole individuals’ percentage arecalculated to get the average percentage of the group. If the group obtains 20% and iscompared to the criteria above, it will fall below 44%. It means the text in atfrustrational level or it needs more teachers’ guidance.

To simplify the explanation of the readability level as given by Heaton, and tomake 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 textshould be qualitatively analyzed in term of it cultural background. This analysismakes it more reliable to judge whether the text has the appropriate level of difficultyor not.

Table 1Criteria of readability Level

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Mean Score (%) Remark

Over 53% Independent LevelBetween 44% - 53% Instructional Level

Below 44% Frustrational Level

Referring to the discussion above, the writer can formulate the procedures ofusing cloze technique to measure the readability of reading materials as follows:

1. Select one passage from the initial, middle, and final parts ofthe textbook;

2. Determine the n-th words being deleted, the fifth, sixth, orseventh;

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; and6. 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. ConclusionReferring to the previous discussion, the writer is able to conclude the

textbooks or other literary works used as learning materials should be quantitativelyand qualitatively analyzed to obtain the real level of their difficulty. Too difficulttexts tend to discourage the students to learn; and too easy texts tend to make thembored and uninterested.

References

Huda, Nuril. 1999. Language Learning and Teaching, Malang: IKIP MalangPublisher

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: PusatKurikulum

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.