Research suggests that L2 students (English-language learners) do not access postsecondary education as the same level as L1 (native English-speaking) peers. Using a computational linguistics approach, this study analyzes financial aid application instructions from 341 randomly selected four-year, Title IV-participating U.S. institutions. Results…

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and…

College students frequently use mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets) to access online courses yet online course designers often do not design courses with mobile learning in mind. This research identified seven national and statewide online course design evaluation instruments and examined the criteria that guide course designers…

A corpus of current editions of statistics textbooks was assessed to compare aspects and levels of readability for the topics of "measures of center," "line of fit," "regression analysis," and "regression inference." Analysis with lexical software of these text selections revealed that the large corpus can…

Previous research has shown that face masks impair the ability to perceive social information and the readability of emotions. These studies mostly explored the effect of standard medical, often white, masks on emotion recognition. However, in reality, many individuals prefer masks with different styles. We investigated whether the appearance of…

This paper aims to explore the reasons behind the limited dissemination of Adamczewski's Metaoperational approach to language beyond the French academic sphere. The theory, which developed in and by contrastivity between 1976 and 2005, is built on the basic assumption that utterances exhibit on their surface observable traces of the utterer's…

Quality assurance (QA) in gerontological and geriatric education programs is regarded as essential to maintain standards, strengthen accountability, improve readability of qualifications, and facilitate professional mobility. In this article the authors present a summary of international developments in QA and elaborate four international trends,…

This study provides an insight into the dominant negotiation processes that occur between the authors of research articles and academic reviewers at the peer reviewing stage. Data of reviewers comments and authors responses on 32 science and engineering based journal articles covering four decision categories (accept as is, accept with minor…

Discusses history of the development of computer software to determine material readability and general design of readability software. Tables present summaries of: (1) parameters used by selected readability scales and their grade level applications; and (2) microcomputer software programs available, including readability techniques included in…

Readability has been gauged by such means as determining the length of individual words in a passage, analyzing types of sentences, and assessing numbers of subordinate clauses, prepositional phrases, modifiers, and so on. Probably the most successful formula has been the Dale-Chall method, which measures readability by determining the percentage…

This paper describes and reports on the performance of six related artificial neural networks that have been developed for the purpose of readability analysis. Two networks employ counts of linguistic variables that simulate a traditional regression-based approach to readability. The remaining networks determine readability from "visual…

Anonymous criticism of a reading consultant's readability analysis of the authors' introductory psychology textbook. (ND)

Found that standard readability indexes by themselves are not useful in measuring readability and comprehensibility of income tax material. Also casts doubt on the use of only readability indexes to measure insurance, labor, and real estate contracts. (PD)

The possibility of changing the prosaic style of college level science textbooks to increase readability was investigated. Conclusions suggest that the readability of college textbook prose is not significantly affected by the stylistic factors employed in most readability formulas. (CJ)

Identifies major philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical issues in the controversy over the legitimacy and methodology of using statistical measures to assess the readability of documents. Explores the implications of the controversy for using numerical readability measures to assess written documents. Examines the pedagogical implications…