Course books are an important source of knowledge input in classroom teaching. Text difficulty is one of the key factors in choosing course books while text readability serves as an important indicator to measure the text difficulty. However, there have been few studies on text readability of college English course books in the past. This survey uses the WE Research platform and adopts Flesch Reading Ease and other readability formulas as the detection tools to study the text readability development of the course books. The researcher analyzes the surface text characteristics of word and sentence length as well as the readability index 1 and 2 of the texts in the 4 volumes of New Target College English Integrated Course to verify whether the compilation of the course books obeys the rule of text difficulty development from low to high. This article firstly summarizes the background, discusses the necessity of understanding text readability in college English teaching. Secondly, it reviews the development and the study of text readability both at home and abroad. Thirdly, it talks about the methodology of the study and discusses the data collected from the platform. It is hoped that this study can provide some guiding significance for editors, publishers, teachers as well as students.
Cite this paper
Zhang, B. (2021). Analysis of Text Readability of College English Course Books. Open Access Library Journal, 8, e7817. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1107817.
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