Abstract:

The purpose of this comparative study is to analyse the readability of English written texts, stated as CEFR B2 level, composed and aimed for the second language L2 reading practice. The corpus of N=14 written passages embraces articles, reports and literary texts collected and established as paradigmatic B2-level texts by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. The labelled or simplified texts published in textbooks or the internet serve students to test and assess reading comprehension when learning English as a second language (Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy & McNamara, 2007; Crossley & McNamara, 2008; Simensen,1987; Young, 1999). The selected texts were subjected to readability analysis employing seven readability formulas with the aim to contrast the genuine CEFR B2 level to the declared CEFR B2 level while comparing results with the Flesch-Reading Ease (Flesch, 1948) scores, which are employed by the CEFR as a primary criterion for measurement of the official difficulty of second language acquisition.

Results demonstrated a discrepancy between the proclaimed and genuine levels of analysed written texts of the corpus, including the sample texts coming from the Council of Europe website, the official producer of the CEFR level chart.

Keywords:

Readability, CEFR B2, English, second language.