C. Readability
1. The Understanding of Readability
Readability is a measure of the style of a piece of writing. The wise teachers will certainly take readability into account when ordering new
books to their students. Readability is one of the most important aspects that should be considered in selecting a good passage for students.
According to Allington and Strange, “readability also means
“comprehensibility”; but because understanding, or comprehension, is unique to each learner, an estimate of the readability of a section of
material is only an estimate.
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However, according to the writer, readability and comprehensible is almost have similar meaning, but she
concludes that its difference is if readability means can be read easily, while comprehensible is can be comprehended.
Readability is not only determined by the length of the passages or the length of the words, but it also determined by how interestingly and
attractively the text is written. Klare in the Hill’s book
concludes
that the term “readability” has come to be used for indicating legibility of either
handwriting or typography, ease of reading due to either the interest value or the pleasantness of writing, and ease of understanding or
comprehension due to style of writing.
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The writer obtains a comprehension that readability presents a written text which is legible,
understandable, and comprehensible. The readability is related to reader ease or success in dealing with
written language. It describes the ease of the written materials to read. Nuttall views that “Obviously a text should be at the right level of
difficult y for the students ….The combination of structural and lexical i,e
26
Allington and Strange, 1980, op.cit., p. 6.
27
Walter R. Hill, Secondary School Reading: Process, Program and Procedures, Boston: Allyn Abcon, Inc. 1979, p. 190.
vocabulary difficulty is readability ”.
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It means that vocabulary affects readability of a text.
While, van Els et. al. the readability of texts was investigated to obtain a standard for the relative degree of difficulty of the textbooks of
which one would eventually have to be selected.
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Hence, readability is used to know the difficulty level of a textbook.
It can be synthesized that readability is concern with the ease and difficulty level of the reader in reading and understanding a text. A good
text has a high readability level if the text is easy to be understood by the readers.
2. Reading Comprehension
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