An EFL Readability Index

This study explores readability and its relationship to the doze passage
performance of EFL students. Fifty reading passages were made into 30-item
doze passages by deleting every 12th word. Each passage was then analyzed
for two sets of independent variables chosen to investigate how well they
predict EFL Difficulty. The first set was made up of various first language
readability indices and the second set was made up of quantifiable linguistic
characteristics of the passages, such as the percent of function words, number
of syllables per sentence and so forth. Correlational, factor, and multipleregression
analyses indicated that the first language readability indices were
only weakly related to EFL Difficulty. However, the analysis of linguistic
characteristics indicated clear groupings among the variables. In addition, when
the number of syllables per sentence, the average frequency of lexical items
elsewhere in the passage, the percent of words with seven or more letters, and
the percent of function words were combined, they were highly related to EFL
Difficulty. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the
development of an EFL readability index.