Table 1 Variables used in this study
From: Predicting the difficulty of EFL reading comprehension tests based on linguistic indices
Indices/variables | Definition |
|---|---|
1. Narrativity | (Genre and rhetorical structure level) How much a text tells a story or presents characters, actions and procedures |
2. Syntactic simplicity | (Syntax level) A subsection of syntax level that assesses a text on the basis of the number of words, their simplicity, and sentence syntactic structure |
3. Word concreteness | (Word level) The level of meaningfulness of the content words and evoking of mental images |
4. Referential cohesion | (Text base level) The degree of the connectedness of content words and ideas as the text unfolds |
5. Deep cohesion | (Situation model) The extent to which clauses and sentences in a text are connected to causal and intentional or goal-oriented connectives |
6. Content word overlap | (Word level) The measure of the content word overlap between two adjacent sentences |
7. Semantic similarity | (Textbase level) The uniformity of parallel syntactic constructions at the phrase level and also parts of speech |
8. CELEX frequency scores | (Word level) The frequency of the words in the CELEX (Baayen et al., 1996) from the early 1991 version of the COBUILD corpus |
9. Volume | (Word level) The number of words in a text |
10. Abundance | (Word level) The total number of different types (lemmas) in a text |
11. HD-D | (Word level) The “probability that a word in a text would be included in a random sample from that text” (Kyle et al., 2021, p.7). |
12. MATTR | (Word level) MATTR (Moving average type-token ratio) is the average of “type-token ratios across multiple, overlapping, equal sections in the text” (Kyle et al., 2021, p.8). |
13. MTLD-original | (Word level) MTLD-original (The measure of textual lexical diversity) represents the mean number of words to reach a point of type-token ratio stabilization |
14. MTLD-w | (Word level) MLTD-w “moving average is a variant of MTLD that uses a moving average approach” (Kyle et al., 2021, p.8) |
15. Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease | A traditional readability formula that measures text readability according to sentence and word length |
16. Coh-Metrix L2 Reading Index | This formula consists of three variables of a word overlap index, a word frequency index, and an index of syntactic similarity to examine the readability of a text |