Assessment of the difficulty of teaching text materials for the initial stage of interpreting training

This study aims to identify linguistic parameters that determine the difficulty of source texts used in teaching interpretation. Interpretation is taken in two of its modes, namely consecutive and simultaneous. The materials for teaching interpretation represented on the website Speech Repository for the training and self-training of interpreters are studied for the beginner level of interpreting competence. In quantitative assessment of the difficulty level of the materials, this research uses a software tool Coh-Metrix. The description of the leveled textual materials for teaching interpreting incudes sets of linguistic parameters, such as narrativity, syntax simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion, deep cohesion. The quantitative measurements of the textual materials on the basis of the language parameters of the leveled source texts thus reveal the characteristics of teaching textual materials for the beginner level of interpreting competence. The author of the study defines text difficulty as one of the components of text readability (M.S. Matskovsky 1976; Flesch R.F. 1979).