Varying Approaches to Readability Measurement

L’article présente et analyse trois mesures de la lisibilité qui ont été développées depuis le début du vingtième siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui : les mesures classiques, les mesures à teneur cognitive et les mesures qualitatives basées sur le jugement humain.Les mesures dites classiques sont celles qui sont les plus largement utilisées. Elles tiennent compte de certaines particularités du texte pour mesurer la lisibilité comme la difficulté des mots et la complexité des phrases. Les mesures à teneur cognitive considèrent la structure du texte et ses aspects sémantiques. Les mesures qualitatives basées sur le jugement humain ont une approche plus heuristique qui considèrent l’ensemble des difficultés d’un texte selon une évaluation plus subjective.La présentation de chacune de ces mesures souligne le cadre théorique sous-jacent, les particularités du texte et les aspects mesurés, sa fiabilité et sa validité ainsi que les domaines d’application où elle est utilisée.The article discusses the three approaches to readability measurement that have been developed from the early 1900s to the présent—classic readability, cognitive-structural readability, and judgment-qualitative approaches. The classic approaches to readability are the most widely used. They use similar text features to predict readability—some aspects of word difficulty and some measure of sentence complexity. The cognitive-structural approaches are concerned more with the structure of a text and its meaning. The judment-qualitative approaches do not rely on specific features but on a qualitative judgement of overall difficulty.Each of these approaches is further treated in terms of its underlying theories, the text features and characteristics mesured, its reliability and validity and its practical uses

Professional Concerns: Reading Instruction and Brain Research

In her contribution to this column, Professor Chall gives an overview of her recent book, and she makes some interesting observations about the question of hemisphericity. While she does not deny the possibility that research focusing on the functions of the right hemisphere of the brain may have long term significance for reading instruction, she does indicate that at the present time it would seem that no simple inferences for what and how schools should teach the various curricular areas can be drawn from such research. Professor Chall stresses the importance of environmental stimulation and experience as fundamental determiners of the brain\u27s development

Print awareness of adult illiterates: a comparison with young pre-readers and low-educated adult readers

In this study the print awareness of 25 unschooled adult illiterates in the Netherlands was compared with that of 24 pre-reading children and of 23 low-educated literate adults with approximately four years of primary schooling. The illiterates were interviewed about their experiences with writing and all participants completed six assessments of print awareness in the language they preferred (first or second language). The outcomes revealed that the three groups did not differ in distinguishing conventional written signs from other visual signs, that both groups of non-readers differed significantly from low educated readers but not from each other in knowledge of logos, inscriptions and knowledge of the written register, while the adult illiterates performed significantly better than the children on grapheme knowledge. Adult illiterates in literate societies seem to be well informed about the uses and functions of written language and about what writing looks like, but like young children they are not good at reading environmental print out of context and in explaining what exactly is represented in writing. The variation in reactions within the group of illiterate adults could be related to existing models of emergent literacy. Implications for adult literacy education are discussed

Learning to read: the great debate

x11, 372 p. , 23 cm

Educational Investment, Family Context, and Children’s Math and Reading Growth from Kindergarten through the Third Grade

Drawing on longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999, this study used IRT modeling to operationalize a measure of parental educational investments based on Lareau’s notion of concerted cultivation. It used multilevel piecewise growth models regressing children’s math and reading achievement from entry into kindergarten through the third grade on concerted cultivation and family context variables. The results indicate that educational investments are an important mediator of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities, completely explaining the black-white reading gap at kindergarten entry and consistently explaining 20 percent to 60 percent and 30 percent to 50 percent of the black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in the growth parameters, respectively, and approximately 20 percent of the socioeconomic gradients. Notably, concerted cultivation played a more significant role in explaining racial/ethnic gaps in achievement than expected from Lareau’s discussion, which suggests that after socioeconomic background is controlled, concerted cultivation should not be implicated in racial/ethnic disparities in learning