Home > Published Issues > 2023 > Volume 9, No. 3, September 2023 >
IJLT 2023 Vol.9(3): 219-223
doi: 10.18178/ijlt.9.3.219-223

Quantitative Research on Readability Formula of Texts for Chinese Heritage Language

Ruo Lin and Juan Xu*
School of Information Science, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China
*Correspondence: xujuan@blcu.edu.cn (J.X.)

Manuscript received January 22, 2022; revised April 15, 2022; accepted December 26, 2022.

Abstract—The compilation of Chinese heritage textbooks has always adopted the standards of teaching Chinese as mother language or as second language. The difficulty level of the texts is mostly measured separately from the aspects of Chinese characters, vocabulary, and grammar. There is no comprehensive quantitative evaluation standard. Readability formula is one of the methods to comprehensively measure the difficulty of text. The present study made use of Chinese heritage textbooks as the source of data and constructed readability formula by the method of multiple regression analysis. The formula includes four language features, i.e., proportion of difficult words, number of different characters, average sentence length, and proportion of function words, which could explain 72.9% of the variation of text difficulty level. Limitations and future works of the formula are discussed. 
 
Keywords—readability formula, text feature analysis, Chinses heritage language texts 

Cite: Ruo Lin and Juan Xu, "Quantitative Research on Readability Formula of Texts for Chinese Heritage Language," International Journal of Learning and Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 219-223, September 2023. doi: 10.18178/ijlt.9.3.219-223

Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.