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Abstract

The experiments reported here concern the relationship between pupils’ expected abilities to ‘comprehend’ four written texts, as predicted by the Dale-Chall readability formula, Cloze procedure and Britton's model of language functions, and their observed abilities to make reasoned judgments about these texts. The two readability measures and the Britton model gave the same predicted order of difficulty for four stylistically different prose passages on the theme Road Accidents. Despite these differences, there were no significant differences between the four passages in the levels of judgment achieved by sixteen-year-old and twelve-year-old pupils in response to questions based on the texts. It seems, therefore, that the linguistic difficulty of a text, as assessed by standard measures of readability, was not an important factor in determining the quality of judgments displayed by the pupils. This suggests that the readability tests are concerned simply with linguistic features of a text and that these may be of no special relevance to the interaction of reader and text involved in the process of judgment

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Readability,comprehension and judgement

Abstract

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