A Reading Text Difficulty Analysis of Senior High School English Textbooks (Version A)

This study researches 3 compulsory volumes and 4 selective compulsory volumes of senior high school English textbooks(version A), using Coh-Metrix and the Compleat Lexical Tutor to analyze the Coh-Metrix L2 readability level, five indices(narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion, deep cohesion) in Coh-Metrix and the proportion of academic words of their reading texts. The findings are: Overall the reading texts in the selective compulsory modules are more difficult than those in the compulsory modules, but the progressive relationship between the 2 modules is unclear. Scores of the five indices and the proportion of academic words fluctuate across different volumes, but with a general trend of increasing difficulty from compulsory modules to selective compulsory modules, except for the narrativity scores and AW ratio. This study employs a quantitative method to assess textbook difficulty, with the aim of providing insights for future textbook compilation and the enhancement of English teaching practices.