Text Complexity of Chinese University Writing Textbooks: Quantitative Analysis Based on Text Features

As higher education continues to place greater emphasis on students' writing skills, high-quality writing textbooks have become pivotal to the teaching process. This study employs a text complexity framework to examine the linguistic features of Chinese university writing textbooks, with the aim of evaluating their suitability for fostering students' writing abilities. Specifically, it investigates lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and readability, providing a theoretical foundation for future textbook improvements and pedagogical optimization. By employing natural language processing (NLP) tools, the study extracts and quantitatively analyzes text features from widely used textbooks, focusing on vocabulary diversity, sentence length, and readability metrics. Statistical methods are then utilized to visualize and compare the data, thereby assessing the alignment between textbook language characteristics and instructional requirements. The findings reveal notable issues in the linguistic features of Chinese writing textbooks, particularly regarding syntactic complexity and readability. Some textbooks exhibit overly nested sentence structures that pose substantial challenges for novice learners. Moreover, the readability indices vary significantly among different textbooks, suggesting that certain language designs do not fully consider the diverse writing foundations and receptive abilities of various student populations.