Using Qualitative Measurement to Determine Text Difficulty: Relating Experts’ Judgment of Reading Text Difficulty and Students’ Comprehension Test Results in Grade Four Amharic Reading passages

Abstract

An objective measurement of text complexity is an important tool in the preparation and selection of texts in teaching reading. This study aims to investigate the extent to which qualitative dimensions of text complexity predict the difficulty level of reading Amharic text. Reading passages included in the fourth-grade Amharic textbook are measured qualitatively by informed experts’ judgments, and the result is compared with the comprehension test results of fourth-grade students in two Addis Ababa schools. The computation of the correlation between the two results yields a statistically significant positive relationship in three of the four qualitative dimensions as well as the aggregate result suggesting that qualitative measures can be used as one source of information to determine reading text difficulty in Amharic and other Ethiopian languages which exhibit similar properties.