Refining the Flesch Reading Ease formula for intermediate and high-intermediate ESL learners
Anealka Aziz Hussin1.
ESL instructors tend to rely on their judgment in estimating the diffi culty
level of reading passages for their learners. This common sense method,
despite being drawn from experience, gut feeling and intrinsic knowledge
of the learners’ ability, is neither effi cient nor objective. A more objective
method is available such as using readability formulas to estimate the
diffi culty level of the passages. One of the highly reliable readability
formulas which have been validated to be used in an ESL/EFL context is
the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) formula. The FRE formula has a diffi culty
scale that ranges from 0 (the least diffi cult) to 100 (the most diffi cult), which
is rather broad and general. Therefore, it was the intention of this study
to refi ne the FRE diffi culty scale for the use of a specifi c group of learners
and identify additional predictors of passage diffi culty to enhance the
ability of the formula in estimating the diffi culty level of reading passages.
To do that, the study replicated Vogel and Washburne’s (1928) process of
developing modern readability formula. Reading passages at intermediate
and high intermediate levels from several ESL reading coursebooks were
analyzed. Three computational tools, the Flesch Reading Ease formula,
Writer’s Workbench 8.18 and WordSmith Tools 4.0 were used to extract
information related to the text characteristics of the passages at text,
sentence and word levels respectively. Findings of the study revealed the
development of a more refi ned FRE formula at intermediate diffi culty level
scale. This refi ned formula, referred as IDL Formula, used the FRE scores
and the coverage of the fi rst 2000 high frequency words of English (HFW
scores) of the passages as predictors of passage difficulty. This formula is able to measure 88.7% of passage difficulty, and has a high reliability
with the Bormuth mean cloze scores. This formula is meant to be used by
ESL instructors, test-setters, materials writers, publishers and curriculum
designers to estimate the diffi culty level of reading passages at intermediate
and high-intermediate levels.
Affiliation:
- Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
Download this article (This article has been downloaded 208 time(s))