日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

Assessments of vocabulary level and readability of academic articles
used in a third‑year ESP reading program

Michio Tajima
Abstract
This paper analyzes vocabulary level and readability of the reading materials used in a“Medical and Dental English”for third‑year Nihon University School of Dentistry students.
The vocabulary of seven articles was computed with software called Range.Readability wasconfirmed with Readability Statistics function of Microsoft Word using Flesch Reading Easeand Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level.Results of the Range indicated that 22.88% to 40.84% of thetotal words in the texts were not in the three word base lists.The Flesch Reading Ease index
indicated that one article was at college level and the other six were at college graduate level.
Both results confirmed that a highly‑advanced level of English in both vocabulary andsentence structure should be acquired.
Key words: academic articles, English for specific purposes, Medical and Dental English,
readability, vocabulary

Introduction
Difficulty of classroom management can be one problem in teaching.Sakui(2007)writes thatthe school curriculum consists of not only academic curriculum, but also classroom management, and the more communicative an approach a teacher takes in the lessons, the moredifficult classroom management can be. All the teachers who took part in her study experienced classroom management difficulties or knew others who had experienced them.
Closely related to classroom management problems, the selection of appropriate textbooks
or teaching materials is a major issue for language instructors. Even though no empiricalevidence is available to them, they are intuitively aware of the influence that a textbook canmake on classroom management. However, as the choices are limited due to the fact that acourse has a specific goal,which in this case is “learning how to read academic articles in thefield of dentistry,”it is necessary to make learners read them whether or not their reading
ability matches the materials.In foreign language education,it is important to take readability
into a consideration when selecting textbooks. It is difficult to expect effective and efficientlearning,where learner ability in the target language has been ignored and when they feel the
textbooks are too easy or difficult,compared to a situation where the materials chosen are at

日本大学歯学部

英語

Nihon University School of Dentistry
1‑8‑13 Kanda‑Surugadai, Chiyoda‑ku, Tokyo 101‑8310, Japan〒 101‑8310 東京都千代田区神田駿河台１‑８‑13(受理：2005年９月 19日）

65

日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

an appropriate level. Things, thus, tend to be rather more goal oriented than process oriented
learning and knowing what can be expected of the selected text linguistically is also a key togiving proper instruction.
In this paper, two things will be considered, 1)vocabulary levels and 2)readability of sevenreading materials used for a course,entitled “Medical and Dental English”at Nihon University
School of Dentistry in the first semester of the 2007 school year.This will help establish whatstandard of English language skills are needed to comprehensively read the academic articles
used in the classroom.

Background
There are three aspects to readability, 1) affective aspects of readers, such as motivation,
attitude,and intention,2)legibility of text,or the visual aspect of text,like the size of letters,
design, or layout of pages, paper brightness, and lastly 3)reading difficulty of the text (Endo,2005., Johnson, 1998). This paper looks into the last aspect of readability.
Readability usually measures how clear or easy a text is to read and comprehend byanalyzing textual aspects,with readability formula,such as the number of words per sentence,
the number of syllables per word, the number of sentences, and so forth.How one reader canor can not comprehend text, of course, largely depends on how one is familiar with form andcontent.Form here means linguistic elements including the structure of sentences and text,and
logical development.Concerning content,culture,social background knowledge,and/or special
and technical knowledge of a specific field are all important.Also,concreteness and abstractness can influence the readerʼs comprehension. Readability, thus, becomes something rather
linguistic and that can be subject to mechanical measurement.
“M edical and Dental English”for third year students at Nihon UniversitySchool of Dentistry
is divided into two 50‑minute lessons per week over a 14‑week period. The students are
assigned one academic article to read everytwo weeks.A native speaker of English teaches thearticles in English for the one 50‑minute lesson and another Japanese teacher who specializes
in the target subject provides a deeper explanation in Japanese for another 50‑minute lesson ina week.This way,each case studyhas four classes,two lessons bythe native speaker of English
and another two byJapanese to finish one article.The course purposes are mainly1)to promote
more English language learning and 2)to have students read academic articles in dentistryfield.
In other words, this is a typical course for “English for Specific Purposes”(ESP). What is
expected in this course is learning efficient reading skills,as well as gaining knowledge in thedentistry field,since more and more academic journals are published in English throughout theworld in dentistry and more Japanese researchers go abroad to attend conferences. Even if
students do not become researchers, they are likely to refer to some international journals togain related information and specialized knowledge in the future. Acquiring English can beconsidered as being closely related to their future occupation.
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Readability Formulae による歯学英語教材分析

Reading formulae
M any reading formulae were thought up in the 20th century,though the Talmudists,scholarsof the Talmud, a collection of Jewish laws and traditions, analyzed the difficulty of writing
sometime around the 10th century as a function of the number of words that could be counted
in a sentence (Endo,2005).In the 20th century,some researchers made word lists according tofield‑dependent word frequency usage. Then, cloze procedure was invented, which takes into
account the percentage of correct answers when filling in the blanks in a text to make itlogically comprehensible. Reading formulae started with word and sentence length, and thenproceeded to incorporate logic and text sense.
One of the most popular reading formulae is probablyone based on a calculation of the lengthof words,sentences,and number of syllables.For example,Flesch also started by making wordlists and tried to check text difficulty by analyzing what words it consisted of. However,realizing this did not go anywhere, he designed a reading formula using the mean number ofwords per sentence and the mean number of syllables per word (Flesch, 1981).
As Greenfield (2004) explains, readability can be seen through vocabulary difficulty andgrammatical difficulty.Considering commonly used readability formula,difficulty in this casemeans the length of words and sentences in a text. The longer words and sentences are, themore difficult theyare thought to become for processing and comprehension.He says that whengrammatically complicated sentence structures exist, their calculation and appraisal will be
more problematical. The author assumes such structures would include things like compound
sentences,embedded‑clause constructions,subordinate clauses,participial constructions and soforth, but is not categorical about this.He also introduces some empirical evidence that there
was no significant difference in readability analysis between texts with and without complex
sentence structures.However,it is also true that,thanks to computers,it is easier than before
to do these calculations. This makes it possible to choose one of various methods to produce
a more complicated analysis.One can carry out meta analysis,comparing conventional readability formulae to see if there is any statistical difference and, in this way, make a moreaccurate formula, or establish new ones tailored to specific fields, like readability of ESP for
the medicine and dentistry field.
There are many different kinds of readability formulae. Flesch reading ease and Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level are built‑in with M icrosoft Word.There are also Fog index,Fry readability graph, and Smog (Endo, 2005). Johnson (1998) mentions FORCAST Formula and Powers‑
Summer‑Kearl Formula as well as others.Kiyokawa (1992)introduces Dale‑Chall formula andspache formula,too,and he writes that there are more than 50 readability formulae that havebeen designed.Among those,Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level will be usedin this paper after vocabulary checking with Range.
Flesch writes (1981)the readability formula as thus: “multiply the average sentence length67日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

by 1.015. M ultiply the average word length by 84.6. Add the two numbers. Subtract this sumfrom 206.835. The balance is your readability score.”
Flesch Reading Ease＝206.835−(84.6×ASW)−(1.015×ASL)
Abbreviations of Flesch Reading Ease Fomula (Endo, 2005)
ASW : average number of syllables per word
ASL : average sentence length

Method and Procedure
Firstly,all the articles are respectivelycomputed with Range to check loadings of vocabulary
in three groups,base word lists 1,2,and 3,and “not in the list.”The first base word list includes
the most frequent 1000 words of English. Likewise, the second includes the second 1000 mostfrequent words, and the third includes words not in the first 2000 most frequent words ofEnglish but which are still frequent in upper secondary school and university texts from a wide
range of subjects (Paul Nation,n.d).Words in “not in the list”are not included any of the threebase lists above.
The sources of these lists are A General Service List of English Words by Michael West(Longman,1953)for the first 2000 words,and The Academic Word List by Coxhead (1998,2000)
containing 570 word families. The first thousand words of A General Service List of English
Words are usually those in the list with a frequency higher than 332 occurrences per 5 million
words,plus months,days of the week,numbers,titles (Mr,Mrs,Miss,Ms,Mister),and frequent
greetings (Hello, Hi, etc).
Secondly,all texts are again computed to detect the readability of each with Flesch Reading
Ease and Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level which translates the 0‑100 of score of Flesch Reading
Ease to a U.S. grade level. M icrosoft Word has “Readability Statistics”function which checkthe grammar and style of writing in English. Summaries or abstracts, lists of works cited orreferences, notes, note numbers, and figures in texts were eliminated from this study because
its purpose was to examine the readability of the main body of each of the articles.The reason
why summaries are excluded is because they must briefly describe what the articles are about
and, consequently, their writing style can be considered unique when compared with the textsof which they are abstracts.
Thirdly, syllable count and mean syllables per word,sentence,and paragraph were checkedwith a website service “wordcalc.com,”because Flesch Reading Ease Formula requires thenumber of syllables, but M icrosoft Word does not reveal them in its results. Another purpose
was to see if there are any differences in results between these two calculations.

Materials
The seven articles studied are as follows, as they appear in the syllabus.
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Readability Formulae による歯学英語教材分析

Article 1: M atis BA, Cochran M A, Wang G, Franco M, Eckert GJ, Carlotti RJ, Bryan C. A
clinical evaluation of bleaching using whitening wraps and strips. Oper Dent 2005;
30: 588‑592.
Article 2: Bolan M , Ferreira M C, Almeida ICS, Derech CD, Ribeiro CLU. Palatal expansion
and the Klippel‑Trenaunay‑Weber syndrome, Am J Orthod Dentofacial Orthop
2005; 128: 385‑387.
Article 3: Santos A.,Goumenos G,Pascual A.Management of gingival recession by the use ofan acellular dermal graft material: a 12‑case series. J Periodontol 2005; 76: 1982
‑1990.
Article 4: M atsumura H,Atsuta M .Repair of an eight‑unit fixed partial denture with a resin‑bonded overcastting : A clinical report. J Prosthet Dent 1996; 75: 594‑596.
Article 5: Gozneli R, Ozkan YK, Kazazoglu E, Akalin ZF. Effects of Bartterʼs syndrome on
dentition and dental treatment : A clinical report. J Prosthet Dent 2005; 93: 522‑
525.
Article 6: Ohki H, M atsumoto M , Hasegawa M, Shimizu O, Mukae S, Amano Y, Komiyama
K. Unusal cyst‑like lesions in the parapharyngeal space associated with recurrenceof tongue carcinoma. J Oral Sci 2005; 47: 219 ‑222.
Article 7: Chen I‑P, Karabucak B. Conventional and surgical endodontic retreatment of amaxillary first molar: unusual anatomy. J Endod 2006; 32: 228‑230.

Findings and Synthesis
Range shows number and percentage with “Tokens,”“Types,”and “Families.”“Token”
means the total numbers of words in the text. “Types”means the number of unique words inthe text and unique in this case indicates that each word is onlycounted the first time it appears
and not counted at anysubsequent appearance in the same text.“Family”tells the total numberof times the word and its family members occur in all the texts. For example, able and abler
are counted as one family (Paul Nation. n.d.).
The first list received loadings of words ranging from 148 and 301 words,38.14% and 52.17%(Article 4 and 1). The second list contains many fewer words compared with the first list of
Table 1 : Range printouts for the articles (Types/%)
Word list

Article 1 Article 2 Article 3 Article 4 Article 5 Article 6 Article 7

First list

301/52.17 230/45.63 266/48.10 148/38.14 224/42.75 213/44.38 212/42.83 227.71/44.86 47.74/4.44

Second list

60/10.40 57/11.31 114/20.61 66/17.01 57/10.88 60/12.50 77/15.5

70.14/14.03 20.57/3.81

Third list

84/14.50 28/5.56

39.43/7.70 20.18/3.15

34/6.15

28/7.22

29/5.53

32/6.67

41/8.28means/d

Not in the lists 132/22.88 189/37.50 139/25.14 146/37.63 214/40.84 175/36.46 165/33.33 165.71/33.40 29.44/6.81
Total

577

504

553

388

524

69

480

495

503

60.88

日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

between 57 (Article 2 and 5) and 114 words (Article 3), and 10.40% (Article 1) and 20.61%(Article 3)of the whole text.The numbers of words belonging to the third list drop to between
28 (Article 2) and 84 (Article 1) and the range of percentage of the third list are from 5.53%(Article 5)to 14.50% (Article 1).Both the first and second lists cover onlya little more than 50%
of each text, or Article 1 covers 62.57% and the third list proportions do not even account for
10%, but again, Article 1 shows 14.50%. This apparently indicates that Article 1 has more
frequently and commonly used words and Article 5 is more challenging to read than the others
are, just considering its vocabulary level.What is surprising is that average of the percentageof the words “
not in the list”is 33.40%.In particular,the Range revealed over 40% of the words
in Article 5 is not in the three word lists.
The Readability Statistics of M icrosoft Word can elicit numbers and means of words,
sentences,paragraphs,and the readability of text,and so forth.Moreover,Microsoft Excel canhelp with the checking of basic statistics such as means and standard deviations of each of thecategories.For example,the mean number of words of the seven articles is 1459 words and thatof sentences is 73.29.They are rather short articles in general.As the number of words varies
depending on the length of articles,it may not be worthwhile for the purpose of comparing thereading difficulties of those articles. However, it is also probably true that the longer readingmaterials are, the more information there is to process,which would make it seemingly moredifficult to comprehend as a textual whole.
The number of sentences per paragraph ranges from 2.4 to 8.5 and the mean is 4.84, which
Table 2 : Microsoft Word printouts of readability statistics
Article 1 Article 2 Article 3 Article 4 Article 5 Article 6 Article 7

mean

s/d

(Counts)
Words

2095

1351

1866

928

1265

1453

1255 1459.00

Characters

11138

7449

10162

5159

7109

8276

7096 8055.57 2023.27

Paragraphs

61(33)

20(17)

29(22)

19(14)

14(11)

10(8)Sentences

106

63

101

48

59

68

68

73.29

21.77

Sentences per paragraph

2.4

3.7

4.3

3.6

5.3

8.5

6.1

4.84

2.01

Words per sentence

19.1

21.3

18.3

18.6

21.3

21.3

18.4

19.76

1.46

Characters per word

5.0

5.3

5.3

5.3

5.4

5.5

5.5

5.33

0.17

Passive sentences %

25

47

41

52

25

38

41

38.43

10.26

Flesch Reading Ease

36.5

24.6

28.9

24

18.9

24.5

18.5

25.13

6.17

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12.00

0.00

13(11) (16.57)

396.45(8.58)(Averages)(Readability)

Flesch‑Kincaid Grade level70

Readability Formulae による歯学英語教材分析

is again not so high. Yet, the number of words per sentence ranges from 18.3 to 21.3 and themean number of words per sentence is 19.76 and standard deviation is 1.46.Technically,half ofthe sentences in those articles are longer than 19.76 words. Considering the possibility thatsomewhere from 25 to 40% of these words are not in the 3000 word base list,and that most ofthem are likely to be technical terms, learners of the target language would be expected findit quite difficult to comprehend such texts.
As for Readability,the lowest proportion of the use of the passive among the articles studied
is 25% and the highest 52%.The mean is 38.43%.Endo (2005)writes that the percentage of thepassive voice should be under 5 to 10% of total text, though the validity of this assertion has
not been confirmed.M yers (1994)says that many passive voice sentences are changed into theactive voice in popular magazines when theyrewrite scientific articles for non‑specialists,since
it is considered easier to read.It maybe a good idea to teach rephrasing of the passive into theactive as well.
Flesch Reading Ease shows readability to range from 18.5 to 36.5. According to Flesch
Reading Ease index table (Table 3),while Article 1 is more easily readable than the others andyet at a “difficult”level,all the other articles are “very confusing.”The Flesch‑Kincaid Grade
Level reveals all the articles are grade 12 or higher.A score of between 30 and 49 is college leveland 0 and 29 is college graduate level (Flesch, 1981).

Table 3 : Flesch Reading Ease index table (Endo 2005, Flesch 19 81)
Score

Style Description

Estimated reading grade

90‑100

Very easy

5th grade

80‑89

Easy

6th grade

70‑79

Fairly easy

7th grade

60‑69Standard

8th and 9th grade

50‑59

Fairly difficult

10th to 12th grade

30‑49

DifficultCollege

0‑29

Very confusing

College graduate

Discussion
Range shows outstanding percentages of words “not in the list”in all the articles,especially
Article 5 which includes 214 words out of 524 types of words used, loading more than 40% of
the total words.The plausible reasons for this are that the article requires many words which
1) have extremely low frequency of use in other cases, 2) are highly complex, 3) are purely
technical terms for dentistry, and/or 4)are all of the above.
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日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

The results of Range clearly demonstrate the usefulness of vocabulary building activities.
Third base word list words alreadyapproach an academic word level.Although the percentagesof third base word list words are from 5.53% to 14.50%, less than 10% except Article 1, thepercentages of“
not in the list”words are very high.In fact,“not in the list”reaches the second
largest proportions among the four lists in all the articles.The importance of the role of ESP
stands out here. It would certainly be a good idea to make a word list specifically for thiscourse.It is time consuming for students to consult their dictionary for every word which theyencounter for the first time.Although Flesch writes that he started by making a word list and
got nowhere (Flesch,1981),without enough specific knowledge of vocabulary,it would be next
to impossible to comprehend this type of text.
However, the problem does not lie only in vocabulary. Cohen et. al. (1998)discuss problemsof classifying vocabulary as technical or non‑technical.Compound words made of words in thefirst two word lists seem easyenough,but some are used in specific ways requiring a specialized
terminology in Japanese. For instance, the word “chief”is in the first 1000 words, and “complaint”in the second 1000 words, but “chief complaint”is translated as “shuso”and that isbasically a medical (including dentistry)term in Japanese and is hardly used elsewhere.
In this study, the Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level shows level 12, but considering the nature of
the texts, they are realistically much higher than the 12th grade of the U.S.education system.
Johnson (1998) writes in his website that readability is decided on for 50 percent of correct
answers with regard to text comprehension. It is rather doubtful whether readers really
understand the text in such a case. Because of this, a more accurate measure of readability
would be,in this case,to add two grades to the Flesch‑Kincaid Grade Level(Johnson,1998).The
conclusion is that the texts under consideration are, realistically, even more difficult to readthan they might appear.
Taking into consideration the nature of all academic articles,the two study results showingthat the dentistry field texts used this time required a high educational background areunderstandable.The articles,being mostlycase reports,need a large number of technical terms.
One Japanese teacher told the students in his lecture that academic articles should be written
so that anyone can understand them and,assuming one has enough vocabulary,they should not
be difficult to read.However,the results of readability studies indicate that vocabulary is not
the onlyobstacle.It is true that academic articles are usuallywritten in a certain format so thatanyone with enough knowledge of the field should be able to comprehend them. The problem
is that readers should have knowledge of the certain textual rules as well as vocabulary.
One thing M icrosoft Word does not show is the number of syllables per word,sentence,andparagraph.The number of syllables is needed in order to reveal Flesch Reading Ease.At least,
the author is not aware of how to check it with Microsoft Word. However, the website,
wordcalc.com can check number of syllables in a text.Other software should exist,which has
the same function as well.
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Readability Formulae による歯学英語教材分析

Table 4 : wordcalc.com printouts of statistics of the articles
Article 1 Article 2 Article 3 Article 4 Article 5 Article 6 Article 7
Paragraph Count

33

15

18

10

7

10

9

Sentence Count

103

62

94

44

67

60

68

Word Count

2100

1382

1924

927

1464

1310

1258

Syllable Count

3093

2222

3066

1623

2474

2199

2187

Character Count (alphanumeric)

10485

7201

9861

4988

8011

7083

6874

Mean sentences per paragraph

3

4

5

4

10

6

8

Mean words per paragraph

68

92

107

93

209

131

140

Mean syllables per paragraph

99.77

148.13

170.33

162.30353.43219.90243.00Mean characters per paragraph

67.74

92.13

106.8992.70

209.14131.00139.78Mean words per sentence

20

22

20

21

22

22

19

Mean syllables per sentence

30.03

35.84

32.62

36.89

36.93

36.65

32.16

Mean characters per sentence

20.39

22.29

20.47

21.07

21.85

21.83

18.50

Mean syllables per word

1.47

1.61

1.59

1.75

1.69

1.68

1.74

Mean characters per word

4.99

5.21

5.13

5.38

5.47

5.41

5.46

The major problem is that each software and similar website services extract different
results. For example, M icrosoft Word counted 2095 words in Article 1, while wordcalc.com
counted 2100 words. They may count differently some words with shortened forms such as“Heʼs”as one word or two,and hyphenated words as being one or more.Also,Microsoft Word
elicits the number of paragraphs quite differently from the actual number of paragraphs in thearticles. The actual number which the author manually counted was shown in brackets in thesame column (Table 2). For example,there are many itemized points in Article 1.Apparently,
M icrosoft word counts changing line functions as one paragraph.It is not advisable to rely onthese results. This is one problem which needs to be clarified in studies.

Schema Theory for more efficient comprehension
If background knowledge is essential to understand any text,then,schema theory should be
put into consideration.Schema consists of structured and/or stratified background knowledge
about a particular object (Kanatani,1995).In other words,schema is a whole group of related
points of knowledge needed to comprehend a certain matter. He says that when it comes toreading comprehension schema consists of two elements 1) content schema and 2) formal
schema.The former is related to the text content with regard to background knowledge level,encompassing such matters as the cultural,social,and political background on which the text
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日本大学歯学部紀要 35，65‑75，2007

depends.To understand a new idea or information,one compares and/or applies some relevant
knowledge gained in the past to new information. Without this knowledge, it is impossible tocomprehend something totally new.Relating irrelevant knowledge,comprehension level will go
lower. M ost Japanese specialists in the “Medical and Dental English”course showed many
pictures of teeth, the mouth, etc., in the dental treatment with presentation software in theclassroom. Students could be expected to have a deeper understanding of what they read bymeans of the presentation software imagery.
As for the latter, formal schema are affected in understanding by text structure.There aremany studies about the syntax of scientific articles as Myers points out (1994). Not only
vocabulary, but also a knowledge of sentence structures, coherences and cohesions, topic
sentence and supporting sentences in paragraph reading, the introduction‑body‑conclusion
structure, to name a few, would be very helpful to dissect the text, especially if there are
specific characteristics one should pay attention to in a particular type of writing. One
understands a reading passage more easily when the text structure is familiar to him/her.
Carrell (1987)compared these two components of schema to find which was more affectiveon L2 reading. The more familiar the form and contents are, the easier reading becomes, but
unfamiliar content has a greater effect than unfamiliar form. She concludes that a readingteacher should provide related information and reading skills for L1 reading, whereas L2
reading teachers should teach the rhetorical organization of texts as well as provide background knowledge of its content. While Yorio (1971) finds vocabulary is one of the main
problems in ESL reading, it is not always easier for L2 readers to understand the simple
sentences in terms of syntax (Blau,1982).As L2 readers alreadyhave reading skills in their own
native language,they comprehend somewhat complex texts better than overly simplified ones.
Considering these points, the teaching methods used in “Medical and Dental English”which
are a combination of two approaches, one taken by a native speaker of English and the other
by Japanese teachers with a certain level of expertise in the dentistry field,are very promising.

Conclusions
Academic articles justly require specific knowledge to understand them,but it is meaningful
to evaluate and recognize these textsʼvocabulary and readability level numerically. Comprehension difficulties of the texts in terms of linguistic aspects come from both vocabulary level
and text structures. In this study, Range elicited the fact that 22.88% to 40.84% of the total
words appearing in the texts were “
not in the list.”According to Flesch Reading Ease index
table (Table 3), Article 1 is at a “difficult”level and the rest are at a “very difficult”level,
which, in this case, is college graduate level in the U.S. These texts are used with individuals
having educational levels.This is understandable and may be presumed,as they are academic
articles in the field of dentistry.As such,learners need a large amount of technical words andlinguistic reading skills to comprehend them.
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Readability Formulae による歯学英語教材分析

Further studies are needed to consider 1) establishing ways to teach technical terms more
efficiently and effectively, 2) distinguishing commonly used words in general and specificallyused words in the first and second lists,3)analyzing characteristic sentence structures like thepassive voice and determining whether or not these should be specifically instructed to enhancereading comprehension ability, and 4)exploring further differences of results among different
software and web‑based services.
If a reader is well acquainted with either content or form,it helps to understand the writing,but when neither of these aspects is familiar, it will be even harder for learners to read thesearticles.After all,in order to help Japanese university students to learn how to read academic
articles of this particular field in English,it is necessary for them to acquire not only language
skills, but also knowledge of content and how that content is presented academically.
Works Cited
Blau EK (1982)The Effect of Syntax on Readabilityfor ESL Students in Puerto Rico.TESOL Quarterly.
16 ⑷, 517‑528
Carrell PL (1987)Content and Formal Schemata in ESL Reading. TESOL Quarterly. 21 ⑶, 461‑481
Cohen A, Glasman H, Rosenbaum‑Cohen PR, Ferrara J, Fine J (1998)Reading English for specializedpurposes: discourse analysis and the use of student informants. Interactive Approaches to Second
Language Reading. Carrell PL, Devine J, Eskey DE eds, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 152‑167
Coxhead A (2000)A New Academic Word List. TESOL Quarterly. 34 ⑵, 213‑238
Endo C (2005) Readability Formulae, Yomiyasusa Koshiki no Katsuyo‑Konpyuta wo Riyoshita Eigo
『ReadabilityFormulae（読みやすさ公式）の活用―コン
Kyouzaibunnseki to sono Kaihatsu. 遠藤力．
ピューターを利用した英語教材分析とその開発―』 平成 17年度 山梨県総合教育センター
http://www.ypec.ed.jp/center/kenkyukaihatu/kiyou/H17kiyou‑houkokusyo/genendo.pdf
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