Corpus - based study of syntactic complexity across the learners' readability of academic english textbooks
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Date
2022
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Université Larbi Ben M'hidi Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Reading is one of the important and complex skills; it plays a vital role in ameliorating the learners' proficiency in the target language. Even if there are a variety of tactics and techniques available, teaching someone to read in a foreign language is still a difficult endeavor. In fact, understanding a text is far more difficult, especially for students with limited linguistic background. This study set out to explore whether syntactic complexity creates comprehension problems for middle schools' pupils. The current research strives to discover whether the academic texts provided in middle school coursebooks year four match the learners' grade level and comprehension ability; seeks also to investigate the correlation between syntactic complexity and readability. Therefore, to achieve these goals a corpus of nine texts provided in middle school textbooks level four was gathered and rated by professional assessors. The corpus was then analysed by Coh-Metrix (version 3.0), a robust automated evaluation of text tool, which provided 106 indices from which 38 validated indices that have a relation with readability were selected to answer the chosen questions. After statistical analysis of the data, results have shown that there is a relationship between syntactic complexities on the one hand and learners' reading proficiency level on the other. As a result, the reading inputs to which EFL readers are exposed do not suit their comprehension ability. Therefore, they should practice some strategies to overcome these difficulties. Eventually, this research provided new insights into how important it is to raise the learners' attention towards the importance of reading and to help them overcome reading difficulties using various reading strategies that may improve their reading comprehension. Hereafter, limitations were stated and suggestions for future research were proposed.
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Keywords
Reading, Course book, Syntactic complexity, Reading strategies