Measuring English Readability for Vietnamese Speakers
Phuoc Nguyen, Alexandra L. Uitdenbogerd · RMIT Research Repository (RMIT University Library) · 2019
Reading is important for language learners, but text difficulty needs to match a readers skill level for efficient vocabulary acquisition. Traditional readability measures may not be effective for those who speak English as a second or additional language. This study ex-amines English readability for Vietnamese native speakers (VL1). A collection of text difficulty judgements of nearly 100 English text passages was obtained from 12 VL1 participants, using a 5-point Likert scale. Using features from traditional readability measures,support vector machines and Dale-Chall features gave more accurate predictions than linear models using either Flesch or Dale-Chall features. VL1 participants text judgements were strongly correlated with their past English test scores. This study introduces a first approximation to readability of English text for VL1, with suggestions for further improvements.