reading2.pdf
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Textbook readability and ESL learners
DANIEL KASULE University of Botswana
Abstract: !is paper reports activities (as part of a university course in
language teacher education on teaching reading) in which primary school
student teachers (all ESL in-service teacher trainees) explored their own
skills of determining textbook readability using an online so"ware tool
and a cloze test completed by two hundred and seventy-eight Grade Seven
primary school pupils.5 Findings from the online tool were that the text was
di#cult. !e cloze test con$rmed this when it showed that only eighteen
pupils could read the text unassisted while the rest were frustrated by it.
!e paper uses these $ndings to describe the challenges pupils face and
how readability research is bene$cial to the reading development of ESL
learners if reading of academic texts is approached from the principles of
the interactive view of reading; of cognitive learning theory; and of second
language acquisition theory. It is concluded that teachers’ awareness of rea-
dability issues is helpful for e%ective reading instruction during the critical
formative years of school.
Introduction
An early de$nition of readability by Dale and Chall (1949) included the con-
cept of interest, but since textbooks are not read because they are interesting,
readability will be understood simply as the ease or di#culty with which the
textbook may be understood. Very appropriate for this paper is the view of
reading as an interactive process between the reader, the text, and the writer,
captured by Prins and Ulijn (1998:141) where they de$ne readability as the
ability of the text to communicate the intention of the writer to the intended
reader. An important observation is that each chapter in a textbook o%ers
particular challenges. For purposes of classroom teaching therefore, textbook
readability implies assessing readability chapter by chapter.
As a language teacher educator I am concerned about my student teachers’
awareness of the readability of the textbooks which they $nd recommended
for use in the classes they teach. I therefore set out to bring this awareness to
them, recognising that in many under-resourced classrooms, the textbook
5 In the context of primary schools in Swaziland, the term Grade refers to primary school levels for
children, whose ages range from seven to fourteen years.
RW&
Article
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64 Reading and writing
commands an elevated role in teaching and learning because it may be the
only teaching resource on which the teachers’ explanation is based. Besides the
disadvantage of implanting an unquestioning view of the printed word in chil-
dren, the situation places a heavy responsibility on the quality of the textbook
itself in meeting appropriate criteria regarding the learner’s age, educational
and cultural background, and linguistic pro$ciency. Textbook writers need to
be guided by such requirements. !erefore, the teachers’ ability to determine
readability levels of the textbook is crucial for e%ective teaching and learning.
Measuring readability
Measuring readability is a complex a%air due to the many factors involved.
Gray and Leary, cited in DuBay (2004:18) identify four factors a%ecting read-
ability, namely: content (including propositions, organisation, coherence),
style (including semantic and syntactic elements), design (including typog-
raphy, format, and illustrations), and structure (including chapters, headings
and navigation). Other research reported by DuBay (2004) showed that the
best predictors of textual di#culty were two aspects of style, namely: seman-
tic content (e.g. of vocabulary) and syntactic structure (e.g. sentence length).
Syntactic structure can be determined using readability formulas which are
strictly text-based. !e view of reading as an interactive process implies the
existence of text-based, reader-based, and author-based factors regarding
readability. Not all these factors are quanti$able; for example factors related
to communicating meaning such as legibility of print, clarity and relevance of
illustrations, and conceptual di#culty are non-quanti$able. As well as these,
there are factors related strictly to the reader, seven of which Bensoussan
(1991: 216) identi$ed, namely: faulty top-down processing; faulty bottom-up
processing; linguistic pro$ciency; lack of motivation; over-motivation; famil-
iarity with the topic; and misleading or unfocused questions. !ese cannot be
measured by readability formulas. Instead, more time-consuming tests such as
cloze tests and comprehension tests are used. !erefore, a combination of for-
mulas (to measure text-based and author-based factors) and tests (to measure
reader-based factors) provides a more reliable assessment of the readability of
a given textual item.
Teachers who are familiar with a topic can determine the suitability of written
material for their pupils. However, Johnson (2000:2) claims that teachers usu-
ally under-estimate the di#culty of the text by up to 8 years and adds that the
more familiar the subject teacher is with the topic, the less likely s/he probably
is to see the problem from the pupils’ point of view. !erefore, it is recom-
mended that readability be objectively determined using formula and cloze
tests (Agnihotri and Khanna 1992, Johnson 2000). It is estimated that there
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65Daniel Kasule
are over two hundred formulas (DuBay 2004). !ese are free, online computer
so"ware tools, activated by simply cut-and-paste techniques and they calculate
various readability measurements, using formulas which go by di%erent names
such as Coleman Liau index, Flesh Kincaid Grade Level, Automated Readabil-
ity Index (ARI), and SMOG (Anonymous 2007, a). !e calculations indicate
the number of years of education that a person needs to have completed to
be able to understand the text easily on the $rst reading. !ey also indicate
sentences considered complicated due to the number of words and the syllables
in them. !e estimated readability by age, called ‘reading age’, means a reader
of that age could just cope with the text (Johnson 2000).
Cloze tests, on the other hand, are based on the theory that readers are able to
$ll in the missing words as their reading skills improve. Cloze tests are becom-
ing the object of intensive research with over a thousand studies reported
(DuBay, 2004:22). !e word cloze is derived from the word ‘closure’, a term
associated with Gestalt psychologists, who maintain that human behaviour is
motivated by the need for wholeness or completeness. Teachers do better to
regard reading as a meaning-making activity, a principle on which cloze tests
are grounded. Unfortunately, when meaning fails, reading becomes frustrating.
From the theory of second language acquisition (SLA) we learn that indi-
viduals bene$t from input and interaction. During reading, individual readers
interact with input in the form of print. Research on L2 oral skill development
(Ellis 1984:86) shows that in classroom settings, SLA bene$ts both from input
and teacher interaction. Ellis adds that it is the interaction itself that aids
acquisition. Classroom reading that merely stops at recognising the printed
words (input) leaves many classroom readers frustrated. !is teacher-student
interaction provides what Krashen (1985: 2004) refers to as acquisition-rich,
comprehensible input, which is slightly above the child’s present level of com-
petence; is interesting; is received in su#cient quantity from the text and the
teacher; and is produced in a low anxiety environment.
Krashen’s (1985) a%ective $lter hypothesis informs us that language learners
block o% input if the atmosphere is $lled with anxiety, uncertainty, threats, and
is not motivating. So Krashen’s a%ective $lter hypothesis cautions that it is not
just the quantity of reading alone, but also how much of it is comprehensible
(Krashen, 1985); or, according to Ellis (1986), how much of it is convertible
into intake. Additionally, how o"en pupils are assigned texts to read may
indicate very little in terms of their reading-skill development. For instance,
are pupils interacting with new ideas and formulating questions (interactive
processing), or are they merely responding automatically to what the text is
throwing at them (bottom-up processing)? A balance of these two processes
bene$ts their reading-skill development.
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66 Reading and writing
Additionally, teachers are the most knowledgeable people about the norms of
linguistic competences of the children they teach. !ese norms assist in assess-
ing the di#culties children would meet based on sentence analyses. Because
the norms are known to them they form a psycholinguistic theory that informs
the teacher about what the individual readers in the class can be expected to
understand in a text. With this knowledge, planning to minimise the textual
di#culties is possible.
!e study context
One contextual problem is that many developing countries are facing an ever-
increasing school population. In Swaziland, where this study was conducted,
there is a noble goal to “increase access to the lower levels of the education sys-
tem by making basic education free and compulsory” (UNDP and Swaziland
Human Development Forum, 2001:108). According to the Central Statistics
O#ce (2005), there are 555 primary schools with an enrolment of 22,1956
pupils (up from 21,8352 in 2004). !e same source also puts the teacher-pupil
ratio at 1:33 at primary school. It is however common to $nd classes with ratios
much higher than this $gure. Working in crowded classrooms casts doubt on
the e%ectiveness of reading instruction. In an environment where textbooks
are centrally chosen on a one-suits-all basis, the textbook becomes a potential
source of reading problems for particular children. Needless to say, the text-
book may not be available in su#cient numbers for every child to have a copy
and/or may be too old and overused between several generations of users,
rendering its physical state uninspiring.
!ere is therefore a need to explore ways of developing e%ective reader-author-
text interaction in the classroom. However, working with academic texts that
are written in a language in which one is not competent, as is the case in ESL
classrooms, is not easy. Nor can young readers readily make easy use of their
home languages as resources for understanding and arguing, because these
languages are not used in school, and are thus not developed for use in aca-
demic discourse. So students cannot turn to these languages as support for
their processing of concepts conveyed in the unfamiliar language of the text
book. And the teachers’ explanation, which is based on information derived
from the textbook, is conveyed in the same unfamiliar language that they are
struggling with. Under these circumstances, disentangling the nature of read-
ing problems for the purposes of reading instruction can be a complex task.
Studies that are grounded in the interactive view of reading (Greene 2001,
Prins and Ulijn 1998, Dean et. al 2006, Cutting and Scarborough 2006, Ben-
soussan 1998, Singhal 1998) indicate that in addition to learner-based factors
(such as the learners’ linguistic pro$ciency), problems also arise from the text
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67Daniel Kasule
itself. For example, Deane et al (2006) reviewed several studies that showed
that across school levels, texts shi" from being primarily narrative to being
expository in nature and use increasingly sophisticated vocabulary, and more
complex syntactic patterns. !erefore, in addition to learner-based factors,
understanding text-level di#culties can help predict the chances of success-
ful interaction between reader, writer and text. With regard to textbooks,
children’s linguistic pro$ciency may either refer to the ordinary language
contained in the text which the children have not yet fully mastered; or to the
technical language used across the entire textbook which changes from one
topic to another; or to both of these.
All the above insights were helpful in combining the use of online so"ware
tools and the cloze test so as to allow a cognitive assessment of the readers,
their application of interactive text processing, and their knowledge of English
sentence structure for purposes of reading a text that they were encountering
for the $rst time. It was hoped that in this way the studen teachers would see
the problem from the learners’ point of view.
!e study design
Seven student teachers undertook the study in two steps: Step one involved
the use of online so"ware computer tools to assess the readability of a retyped
version of a text extracted from the chapter ‘Weather and Climate’ in Science
Grade Seven Pupils’ Book, Primary Course for Swaziland. Step two involved
the student teachers using the same text as in step one to conduct a cloze test
on pupils at a school of their choice during the university’s mid-term break.
For step one, the retyped version of the selected passage of 246 words was cut-
and-pasted on-line as instructed on the website http://www.online-utility.org/
English/readability, and processed by the so"ware to give readability scores
in terms of di#cult level; the number of years of education needed for one to
understand it easily on the $rst reading; and the sentences judged to be com-
plicated and requiring improvement.
For step two, to test whether the pupils had the ability to make sense of the
text without resorting to recall, the student teachers developed a cloze test
following ideas from Burns et al (1988) and Taylor cited in DuBay (2004: 27).
!e test was prepared as follows: the $rst sentence was le" intact but therea"er,
every $"h word was deleted. !e study was conducted during February. At this
time of the year, Grade Seven classes would not yet have covered the selected
chapter - the test would have been invalid if they had as their answers might
be based on recall rather than on a $rst reading. Pre-testing at nearby schools
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68 Reading and writing
indicated that pupils would need more than an hour to complete the test. !e
pre-test also gave an idea of the kinds of answers to expect.
During pre-testing, one problem reported by the student teachers was that
pupils felt very threatened, $rst by the test itself, and secondly by the pres-
ence of the stranger in their classroom. To minimise this e%ect (a) the regular
teacher administered the test in the absence of the student teachers, and (b)
the pupils were told that any answer was right as long as it made sense.
Each of the seven student teachers administered the test at one Grade Seven
class at a school of their choice. !e result of this random choice was one
urban, and six rural schools were used. Altogether, 278 pupils wrote the cloze
test.
Pupils were directed to $ll in the missing word. Pupils were not told the source
of the text nor were they told that only the same word that the author had used
would be marked as correct. Individual pupil performance was then graded
as a percentage. !e lower the score, the more di#cult the text was for that
individual. Based on performance in the test, readability of the text for each
pupil was then given as being at one of three levels (DuBay 2004:27):
50-60% = independent (unassisted reading) level
35-50% = instructional (assisted reading) level, and
Below 35% = frustration level
Expectations
Our initial expectation was that the cloze test would get the children to engage
individually and directly with the author’s language, without any interac-
tion with anyone else, such as with each other or with their teacher. Because
textbooks may not suit all readers alike, we expected that di%erences in per-
formance on the cloze test would result from this factor. Our other expectation
was that the reading of textbooks was a problematic activity for many children
(Burns et al 1988, Johnson 2000). Grade Seven is a particularly signi$cant
period in the life of school-going children in Swaziland: it is preparation for
entry to secondary school where harder texts await. It is also at these higher
Grade levels that teachers more o"en assign students to read texts on their
own. Texts at these levels more frequently use technical and specialised vocab-
ulary and concepts. Another expectation was that readability di#culties would
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69Daniel Kasule
be more pronounced in non-urban primary schools since performance in
national examinations o"en portrays urban schools as being advantaged.
Findings and discussion
!e Flesch Reading Ease (Flesch RE) online so"ware tool uses an index of zero
to a hundred. !e closer the score is to a hundred, the easier the content; the
closer the score to zero, the more di#cult. !e report for the text gave a Flesch
RE index of 65.76. According to the Flesch Reading Ease Table, at 65.76 the
text is standard, has an average sentence length of seventeen words and con-
tains 147 syllables per 100 words, and is suited to readers who have completed
the seventh or eighth Grade, based on US standards (Anonymous 2007, b).
!is $nding shows that the text is slightly above the level it is intended for use
in Swaziland. We thought that this might not necessarily be a bad thing as it
o%ered a slight challenge to the targeted readers.
!e number of years of formal education that were required so as to under-
stand the text on $rst reading varied according to the formula: 9.89 on the
Gunning Fog Index; 9.35 on Coleman Liau Index; 7.30 on the Flesh Kincaid
Grade level; 7.00 on the ARI; and 10.11 on the SMOG index. Again, which-
ever index was used, the text was predicted to be challenging at the Grade
Seven level in Swaziland schools, for which it was intended. Both $ndings
can serve to challenge common assumptions among teachers that a textbook
recommended for use by the Ministry of Education automatically matches
the abilities of the children in the classroom and therefore requires no guided
instruction.
At Grade seven pupils should begin to appreciate that muddle is more likely in
a long sentence than in a short one no matter whether one is reading or writ-
ing it. Most writing instructors recommend $"een to twenty (15 – 20) words
per sentence for this level of readers. !e so"ware tool reported an average
of seventeen (17) words per sentence according to the Flesch Reading Ease
Table (Anonymous 2007, b). !is text is therefore within the recommended
sentence length.
Our subjecting this text to analysis by the online tool might appear ill-con-
ceived as the tool was intended for use in a completely di%erent context.
However, since the analysis involved purely mathematical calculations of
sentence length, syllables per sentence and number of sentences in the text, it
is justi$ed. !e tool analysed syntactical features that have been con$rmed in
several studies (DuBay 2004, Deane et al. 2006, Bensoussan 1998, Prins and
Ulijn 1998, Greene 2001) as factors in readability.
F G H G I J K J L M N K O M I P Q R S T U V V W X J Y Z J W Z I J K K K [ \ I ] ^
70 Reading and writing
!e tool also listed the following $ve sentences which it suggested needed
rewriting in order to improve readability of the text:
Coastal regions near oceans and large lakes may have di%erent cli-
mates than other regions at the same latitude and altitude.
LATITUDE: Regions at low latitudes near the equator have hot cli-
mates because the sun’s rays shine more directly there.
It can be freezing, with snow at the top of a high mountain, even on
a mountain located in a hot part of the earth.
However, the average weather over a large region is usually quite
similar from year to year.
Swaziland residents are familiar with weather and climate di%erences
at di%erent altitudes.
!ese $ve were among the longest sentences in the text. !ey also contain
several words with more than two syllables. !e $ve were therefore assumed
to cause di#culty. For purposes of classroom teaching, this $nding implies
that teachers would do better to regard sentence length and word length in a
text as potential causes of di#culty. (Harrison cited in Agnihotri and Khanna
(1992:284) informs us that the longer a word is, the more likely it is to be rare.)
Table One, below, reports, class by class, on the performance of the 278 Grade
Seven pupils on the cloze test. It is notable that class sizes were above the norm
of 1:33 given by Swaziland’s Central Statistics O#ce (2005). As O’Sullivan
(2006) observed, overall teacher-pupil ratios are not an accurate re*ection of
actual class-size as they are obtained by dividing the number of teachers in a
school by the number of pupils, without considering the common practice of
subject teaching, for example. Unlike class teaching, subject teaching, which
is common in upper primary and secondary school, increases the number of
teachers in a school thereby making the teacher-pupil ratio appear lower than
it actually is in certain subject speci$c classes. As noted earlier, a large class
impacts negatively on the e%ective teaching of reading.
F G H G I J K J L M N K O M I P Q R S T U V V Y J J Y Z J W Z I J K K K [ \ I ] ^
71Daniel Kasule
Table 1: Number of children by category of readability
Level Class
A
N = 47
Class
B
N = 52
Class
C
N = 20
Class
D
N = 31
Class
E
N = 46
Class
F
N = 47
Class
G
N= 35
Independent
(Unassisted
reading)
18 0 1 0 0 0 0
Instructional
(Assisted
reading)
3 2 0 0 0 0 0
Frustration 26 50 19 31 46 47 35
In Class A, the only urban sample, eighteen children in this class could read
the text unassisted, three could use it when assisted, and twenty-six would be
frustrated by it. Although this does not give a normal curve, it ful$lled our
expectation that a recommended textbook suits individual children in a class
di%erently. Results for the other six samples from far-*ung places (classes B,
C, D, E, F, and G) consistently show the entire class reading the text at frustra-
tion level. !is $nding underscores the need for classroom teachers to accept
that readability is an issue. !e right response is not to reject the particular
textbook but, rather, to approach the teaching of reading more systematically,
as we shall show later, a"er identifying the challenges the children faced in
the cloze test.
Answers supplied by the children to the forty-seven gaps in the cloze test
were analysed for patterns emerging. !e patterns found to be prevalent are
summed up and discussed below.
Disregard for text structure, semantic and syntactic clues, and misuse
of collocation
!e text comprised $ve short paragraphs under the heading ‘Weather and
Climate’. !e two opening paragraphs introduced the topic. !e last three para-
graphs followed the sub-headings ‘Altitude’, ‘Latitude’, and ‘Bodies of Water’,
respectively. !e authors had intended, no doubt, that the subtitles should
serve as lead-ins to paragraph topics and hence to serve as an aid to readers’
comprehension. For purposes of our study, we therefore expected the sub-
headings to provide clear clues to the missing word. However, as the results
show, this did not prove to be the case.
F G H G I J K J L M N K O M I P Q R S T U V V Y K J Y Z J W Z I J K K K [ \ I ] ^
72 Reading and writing
We also expected that semantic and syntactic clues implied by the context
would enable gap-$lling. However, our analysis of the quality of answers pro-
vided by children in the cloze test indicated a complete disregard for syntactic
and semantic clues. !e randomly selected sample answer below is representa-
tive of this kind of problem:
Regions at low (33) is near the equator have (34) di"erent climates
because the sun’s (35) became shine more directly there. (36) Big
Bend polar regions the sun (37) and low in the sky, (38) 12.00 at
noon in the (39) evening time. Such regions have (40) hot tempera-
tures most of the (41) highveld.
!is child refers to ‘Big Bend’ which is a name of a town in Swaziland, and to
‘highveld’ which is a geographical region in Swaziland. !e child (and there
were many others) is using the geographical context of Swaziland alone and is
refusing to abandon it, even when the paragraph, in its reference to ‘the equa-
tor’ and the ‘polar regions’, clearly demands a global context. Ignoring those
semantic clues creates the problems. !e child is not guided by signposts of
sentence structure, such as when one has the ‘the sun’s (something)’, the child
supplies a verb. Readability issues at the semantic and syntactic levels relate to a
reader’s ability/inability to use the signposts e%ectively to negotiate possibilities
and thus aid comprehension. When this fails, the text is read at frustration level
as the results of this study show. Pointing out these features of the text could
reduce the frustration arising from miscomprehension. Deane et al (2006:260)
rightly observed that the reading process involves combining “information
from successive sentences to understand the global communication of the text”.
Di#culties arising from text miscomprehension may also be attributed to
vocabulary in the text. !e following technical vocabulary contributed to the
di#culty: altitude, latitude, weather, climate, bodies of water, and polar regions.
Because children would be required to master and recall these words as part
of the content of the chapter, classroom activities would undoubtedly be more
rigorous with more time on the task for this to happen than by glancing over
them in their textbook. We also expected certain ordinary words in the text
to have contributed to the di#culty for a Grade Seven pupil such as: factors,
determines, residents, and continually.
As con$rmed earlier by the online tool, sentence length increased progres-
sively to give readers greatly expanded syntactic structures. With regard to the
cloze test, such sentence expansion sometimes resulted in more blank spaces
to $ll within a single sentence and so, collocation and awareness of sentence
structure would be important clues in this regard. For ESL children, reading
a text becomes di#cult because their familiarity with collocations in English
_ ` a ` b c d c e f g d h f b i j k l m n o o p b c p q c r q b c d d d s t b u v
73Daniel Kasule
and the many variations in the structure of the English sentence is limited. In
this study the answers provided by the children tended to indicate a formulaic,
rather than an analytical, approach to English syntax; for example, when the
subjects saw ‘latitude and _?? presence of ’ 33.5% (93 out of the total 278) of
children immediately $lled the gap with ‘longitude’. Yet the correct answer was
the simple word ‘the’.
Equally confounding, ‘the sun’s rays shine’ arguably a familiar collocation,
proved di#cult for the children to predict. Out of the total two hundred and
seventy eight (278) answers, only twenty one (21) were correct (7.6 per cent of
the total) largely from class A, the one urban school in the study. !e frequent
answer of choice was ‘the sun’s is shine’; and in one class, all forty-seven (47)
children settled for this answer. Rather a very odd choice of answer! Although
possible alternative collocations (such as ‘the sun’s light’, ‘the sun’s position’, ‘the
sun’s energy’ and ‘the sun’s heat’) were wrong in the context of this study, they
were given by only twenty three (23) children out of a total two hundred and
seventy eight (278). !is number is too small for us not to make the claim that
children’s approach to English syntax is formulaic at times, and at other times
unpredictable, but certainly not analytical. It appears the subjects were easily
misled when they relied on a more familiar formulaic utterance, namely: ‘the
sun is shining’ frequently used to describe the day’s weather and ignored the
main clue in the text which is the apostrophe a"er the word ‘sun’.
!e nature of the challenges
!e challenges of the cloze test on the children were enormous, recalling that
the cloze test was an unexpected one and on a topic that the children had not
yet covered. As the results show, a large majority were not pro$cient read-
ers. And because pro$cient reading is not an event but a process, classroom
instruction needs to plan it as a series of events that reinforce each other. Grabe
(1992:50-3) o%ers the view that successful reading is composed of sub-skills.
In our e%ort to understand reading-skill development we shall use Grabe’s
six component sub-skills of reading as a framework to analyse and tabulate
the demands. On the basis of these sub-skills, classroom instruction can be
planned for reading many other academic texts.
_ ` a ` b c d c e f g d h f b i j k l m n o o p k c p q c r q b c d d d s t b u v
74 Reading and writing
Table 2: !e demands on the children’s reading skills
Grabe’s reading sub-skill Demand from the cloze test
!e perceptual automatic
recognition skill
Pro$ciency in bottom-up processing
of printed words (Cutting and
Scarborough 2006:278) relating to a
topic which was new to the children.
Linguistic skills Pro$ciency in analysing the semantic
and syntactic relationship between
the words (Cutting and Scarborough
2006:278) including the missing one.
Knowledge and skills of discourse
structure and organization
Pro$ciency in recognising the use
of titles, subtitles, cohesive devices,
linking isolated bits of information
(Greene 2001:83) on local weather so
as to understand the global concept
‘climate’
Knowledge of the world Pro$ciency in top-down processing
(Cutting and Scarborough 2006:278),
without the teacher’s help, to bring
meaning to the decoded words
Synthetic and critical evaluation
skills
Pro$ciency in linking the content of
the text to ‘science’ as shown in the
primary school curriculum
Metalinguistic knowledge and
skills
Pro$ciency in making inferences
using contextual clues
!e children in this study who were frustrated by the cloze test would have
performed better had they developed pro$ciency in bottom-up and top-down
processing (sub-skills 1 and 4). !is is possible if they develop linguistic ana-
lytical skills (sub-skill 2) so they can e%ectively use the semantic and syntactic
clues available in order to understand local weather before they understand
global climate (sub-skill 4). Finally, they need to be able to infer that places
where the sun’s rays shine obliquely are cold (sub-skill 6) and so on.
!is did not happen because the children had not had a pre-reading activity
that stimulated using these sub-skills. We can conclude that textbook reading
demands active involvement of readers for it to be successful. !e demands
listed in Table 2 above can form the objective of a classroom reading lesson
of this text. For example, the teacher and the class identifying the function of
the words in a long sentence taken from the text can respond to demands of
_ ` a ` b c d c e f g d h f b i j k l m n o o p t c p q c r q b c d d d s t b u v
75Daniel Kasule
skill 2, 3, 4, and 6. !is makes teaching reading a skills-building activity that
can be applied on a variety of texts they read in class.
Recommendations
It is not practically possible to conduct readability assessments for each chapter
in a textbook before teaching it. Even the online so"ware tools require retyping
or scanning the text before it can be cut-and-pasted on the webpage. However,
the $ndings of this study imply that determining readability is bene$cial to
teaching and learning, as the teacher gets a clearer view of learners’ di#culties
with the text. Our recommendation therefore is that since classroom teachers
are the best available assessors of any mismatch between the linguistic com-
petencies demanded by the text and the resources available to their learners,
action research into the readability of school textbooks, particularly in science,
would inform their decisions regarding the appropriateness and sequencing
of textual content. Recognising this need means providing these teachers with
skills with which to e#ciently determine textbook readability.
Conclusion
One of the limitations of this study was that it was too narrow in scope and
focus, since the readability of a given textbook varies from one chapter to the
next. We can therefore not generalise the $ndings. Secondly, tools are yet to be
developed that speci$cally assess readability of texts intended for use in Eng-
lish as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms where learners’ linguistic norms
are diverse. Such assessment would not merely be desirable for purposes of
rejecting and accepting certain textbooks, but for sensitising teachers to the
di#culties embedded in the text in use. It is hoped that the seven participant
teachers in this study have been sensitized to the need to assess the readability
of the textbook they are currently using and to view textbooks as sources of
potential reading di#culties.
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