Readability Assessment in the Writings of Pakistani Graduate Level Learners With Reference to Coh-Metrix

Abstract

Abstract:

Readability is a well-defined notion that researchers and scholars started to focus on in the beginning of the twentieth century. Readability means automatically estimating the ease or difficulty of a particular text or written material by means of the linguistic characteristics of that text. According to Guo, Zhang, and Zhai (2011) readability is the ease or difficulty with which written material is read or comprehended by the readers. The present research has tried to assess the writings of Pakistani learners on the Flesch Kincaid formula with reference to text readability and grade level to mark the suitability of grade level and readability. Then, at the second level, it judges the texts of Pakistani learners on the Coh-metrix L2 Reading Scale so as to see the standard and depth of writing.  The results show a significant correlation between reading easability and grade level but the L2 reading scale shows, somehow, below the required standard of writing. The learners generate text that is simpler semantically and syntactically which clues to highly coherent text but at the same time, this shows limited choice of type token ratio which might be due to inadequate linguistic knowledge.