A multilevel analysis of the linguistic features affecting Chinese text readability

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the characteristics of text comprehension. We use an approach that includes 32 linguistic features from four main levels (word, semantic, syntactic, and cohesive) that relate to Chinese text readability. The aim is to overcome the restrictions that resulted from adopting only surface linguistic features in investigating text readability in the past. In the present study, the research materials include 386 texts from Chinese textbooks for Taiwan elementary school students in six grades. The texts are reasonably assumed to increase in complexity of readability from grade 1 to grade 6. The readability of each of the 32 features is derived from the statistical trend analysis with respect to the grades. It is hoped that the results of this study can be of significant use in teaching Chinese reading in Chinese as a second language.