ABSTRACT

Teachers have to assess the linguistic difficulty of a text in order to be able to provide pupils with reading material at an appropriate level. It is argued that informed judgments by a thoughtful teacher may have advantages over the application of a readability formula. The measures of word difficulty and sentence length that are used by the formulae are shown to have weaknesses: short or familiar words are not easy to read in all contexts, and long sentences are sometimes easier than short ones. An awareness of grammatical constructions which can cause difficulty gives the teacher a principled basis for simplifying a text.