Readability Trends in Four Genres: A Research Based on COCA

Deng Cheng, Jingxiang Cao

Abstract


Readability measures the ease of reading a text, and high readability indicates easy texts. There has been a resurgence of interest in readability assessment due to the development of efficient natural language processing (NLP) systems. However, most studies have focused on one type of text, and few have compared the readability of different genres and described the diachronic changes in different genres. Based on the large-scale COCA corpus, this paper employs two readability indexes and three readability components to analyze the readability trend of different genres and uses SPSS to test the significance of the trend.

The results showed that the changing patterns of readability varied across the four studied genres. A general upward trend in readability was found in the fiction genre, a mixed trend in the academic and magazine genres, and a downward trend in the news genre. Based on the results, we concluded that there may be multiple factors at work behind the diachronic development of readability and that these factors may have different effects on different genres.


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DOI: https://doi.org/10.22158/eltls.v6n5p1

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