Abstract:

Many factors affect comprehension. One of them is the appropriateness of the text difficulty level. Texts which do not suit students’ needs and instructional demand may not help to expand their competence in the language learnt. One of the ways of evaluating text complexity is by assessing the reading ease of the texts chosen. For English texts, many readability tests are available online for teachers to use. However, Arabic teachers do not have this option available for them. This paper presents the prototype of a web-based readability index for Arabic language. A number of factors were considered in the formulation of the index. This includes word frequency, Arabic morphological structure and lexical density. The Arabic readability index was computed based on a corpus of Arabic language. How the formula was computed will be discussed in the presentation.

Keywords:

Arabic text readability index.