English Text Difficulty Is Subjective and Objective—But Not Same

University of Tsukuba

Tsukuba, Japan—Evaluating the difficulty of English texts used in educational materials and language assessments is a central concern in English language education. Traditionally, researchers have relied on objective measures of text difficulty based on linguistic features, including characteristics of words and sentences. However, learners can differ substantially in how difficult they perceive the same text to be. To examine the relationship between objective and subjective text difficulty, the researchers investigated the extent to which objective estimates of text difficulty correspond with learners' subjective perceptions.

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