Readability of French as a foreign language and its uses
Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd · RMIT Research Repository (RMIT University Library) · 2005
Reading is an important means of foreign language acquisition, particularly for vocabulary. Providing reading material that is of a suitable level of difficulty allows users to acquire vocabulary the most efficiently. Thus an on-line reading material recommender system for language learners requires a readability measure so that the difficulty of texts can be automatically assessed. However, most readability measures were developed for native child speakers of English. In this article I discuss an experiment in readability for learners of French. I conclude that using the average number of words per sentence correlates more closely with human judgements than many commonly available readability measures. I propose a new readability measure for learners of French that have English as their main language, which combines sentence length with the number of words that are similar in both languages (cognates). This measure slightly improves on sentence length for modelling French readability.