The purpose of this book is to introduce the research on readability, defined here as reading
ease. The first part of the book covers how people read. A series of national literacy surveys …

IN THE PAST 30 OR 40 YEARS there has been much discussion of objective formulas to
measure the readability of texts. These formulas measure variables such as sentence length …

The question of what features make a text difficult or easy for a reader is examined in this
paper, which looks at the implications from the perspective of readability formulas. This is …

Texts are routinely simplified for language learners with authors relying on a variety of
approaches and materials to assist them in making the texts more comprehensible …

In TEFL, it is often stated that communication presupposes comprehension. The main
purpose of readability studies is thus to measure the comprehensibility of a piece of writing …

Early in the 20th century, educators began looking for scientific methods for matching texts
with readers. Some of the best minds in education dedicated themselves to this task …

The goal of matching texts to readers can be aided by using readability formulas in concert
with considering text, task, reader, and strategy variables. For example, signaling makes …

Wniters sometimes call text readable for rather different reasons. They may consider it
legible or interesting or compre-hensible. Over the years, comprehensible has become the …

■ One of the persistent problems of readability formula users has been" What do you do if
you have only a short passage?" Most formulas require a passage of 300 words or longer …

This paper introduces the CommonLit Ease of Readability (CLEAR) corpus, which provides
unique readability scores for~ 5000 text excerpts along with information about the excerpt's …