Readability and the Holistic Approach
Teachers should assess whether the texts they assign are appropriately readable for their students. But how to measure readability? In the holistic approach advocated here, readability is not a static property of a given text. Instead, readability is determined by three characteristics: the suitability of the text for the readers' background, their language, and the instructor's curricular goals.
In general, a text is more readable when:
- it presents concrete issues rather than abstract ones
- it provides the "who," "what," "where," and "when" familiar to the reader
- it is age-appropriate
- it is in a genre familiar to the reader
- it is acceptable to the reader's cultural background
- it is longer, with context clues, or it is a short text on a familiar topic
Before you watch this clip, think of times when you brought a reading text into your classroom and had either a notable success or a notable failure with it. What factors made the text a hit or miss with your students? What made it too hard or too easy or too alien?
Horizons of Expectation
Sometimes, the readability of a text can be enhanced if a missing piece of background knowledge about the text's culture is provided. The reader needs to know about contextual elements that most authentic texts assume their readership knows. Sometimes the missing element is a historical or social fact, sometimes it can be a fact that looks like a social stereotype.
The concept "horizons of expectation" is attributed to Hans Robert Jauss, who used the term when illustrating ways in which textual features reflect a broad consensus about a given genre's style, content, and organizational structures; and to argue that these features suggest assumptions shared among a group of readers. When the literatures and cultures of the foreign languages studied reflect horizons of expectation with which the language learner is unfamiliar, misreadings often result.
What assumptions do Americans share about the National Enquirer? What would the horizon of expectations be for regular readers of the National Enquirer?
Overall, readability and reading goals need to be set vis-à-vis the reader, not as a property of the text in its own right. And through reading an accessible authentic text, the reader is also likely to confront the stereotypes about a culture as well as those held by that culture. By learning to recognize ways authentic media reflect particular viewpoints, readers begin to engage in the practice of multi-literacies—explorations of self and other.