The Readability of Action Pack for 7th, 10th and 9th Grades

Abstract

Reading is a receptive skill - through it we receive information. It is the process of looking at a series of written symbols and getting meaning from them. And we use our brain to convert these symbols into words, sentences and paragraphs that communicate something to us. (Brown [1]) As a result, many readability assessment tools are occurred to help authors and teachers to select the suitable reading materials and to match them with the exact levels of their learners. This research paper is an attempt to shed the light on the readability assessment formulas and their effectiveness in determining the appropriateness of reading materials of the Jordanian curriculum Action Pack 1st, 7th and 9th and to what extent do they match student’s exact levels. Fry Graph, Smog Formula and Flesch Chain are used (calculated by hand) to test the level of the readability for presented materials since they are designed for reading materials of the native speakers, whereas, their usage in assessing other foreign languages reading materials are neglected. The findings show that these presented assessments formulas are not effective enough to determine students exact levels and fail to reveal the variations of the texts difficulty. The findings can be useful to adopters, authors, editors, and publishers of advanced accounting text books to design other effective assessment formulas which suite the ESL learners and curriculums.