Assessment features for complexity of educational texts for schoolchildren

Abstract

It is extremely important to choose an appropriate material for the students learning a foreign language. Hence the issues of studying the complexity of academic texts, their readability and their compliance with the level of language proficiency is of outmost importance. At this point, one can note the inevitable interconnection between linguistics and teaching methods. An educational text is a special type of secondary text that has a number of important functions, among which, first of all, there are informative, cognitive and cultural-logical ones. This type of text both contains new information and has an educational and developmental effect on students.

The difficulty of text as well as its readability and complexity are crucial for text understanding. The evaluation of academic texts difficulty is closely connected with consideration of other characteristics. However, there are no widely accepted definitions of such concepts as “difficulty”, “complexity” and “readability” in contemporary linguistics. They are unreasonably used as synonymic notions. That is why the purpose of this article is to more clearly distinguish between these characteristics of the text. The features of complexity assessment of educational texts are revealed on the basis of their key characteristics.

The study of educational texts’ complexity was conducted by using secondary school textbooks on physics. The text analysis was performed with the help of the automated analyzer Rulingva. This study demonstrates the capabilities of this program and presents the results of the analysis, which suggest that the use of Rulingva analyzer could be beneficial not only for linguists, but also for educators, measurement and control materials developers and those preparing for state exams in various academic disciplines.