Abstract:

Automatic readability formulas have a long tradition in computational linguistics and psychology. Research on readability formulas date back to the 1970s and they aim at finding better ways to catch textual complexity and comprehension for native English speakers. Readability measures try to predict the comprehension difficulty associated to a text in order to support educators in finding better pedagogical material and presentations.

Nonetheless, readability formulas can intuitively be used in order to classify texts for those students who are not native English speakers but want to learn it. Until recently little attention has been paid to whether it is appropriate to apply these tools outside the native English contexts in which the formulas were originally developed. In this paper we want to enhance the research in this field exploring the contributions that scholars have done so far and successively, we contribute to expand research on readability formulas' accuracy for EFL framing and comparing our work with the previous studies in this field. After having examined the state of the art in the field , we introduce the framework of our experiment. Successively we show some results and we conclude with some thoughts and prospectives on results's analysis.

Keywords:

Readability, EFL, learning tech.