A journey to matching reader and text
Dahlia Janan · 2021
As someone who struggled with emergent literacy, I am constantly fascinated by how a particular storybook could have helped transform me into someone who is literate. This fascination lies at the heart of my research in readability. To understand how certain books hook a reader who then becomes engaged in reading, this chapter aims to reveal factors affecting readability. Thus, it tries to analyse whether factors that affect the New Model of Readability that has been developed for an English speaker would be the same or different for readers in other languages. Hence, factors affecting two cases of readers from different backgrounds when interacting with texts were observed and analysed. Miscue analysis, retelling and interview sessions were used as instruments for data collection. The findings show more similarities were found than differences in terms of the factors affecting the readers from different backgrounds when interacting with texts. Therefore, the findings show that the New Model of Readability can be applied across different cultural backgrounds. Nevertheless, findings also show there are possibilities in expanding the model in terms of reading in second or foreign languages.