A discourse-based approach to the assessment of readability

Assessing the readability of texts is an important task for many administrative and educational programs. However, current readability measures have serious empirical and theoretical flaws that make their use questionable. In this paper we propose two methods of assessing readability that involve analyzing the referential and cohesive structures of a text. We suggest that such measures are theoretically better motivated and, through reconsideration of some anomalous performance results from Duffy & Kabance (1982), that they promise to be more adequate in predicting actual reading performance.

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