Some Sentence Difficulty Variables

Readability has been defined as "those aspects of a text which make it easy (or hard) for a reader to understand, e.g. legibility, illustration, colour, vocabulary, conceptual difficulty, syntax and organisation of content " (Gilmore and Wagner, 1986: 5-6). For course writers, the 'text characteristics'of most concern are the last four, which can be categorised further into word and sentence variables. "Studies over the years have suggested and still suggest that the two variables of word difficulty and sentence difficulty account for most of the variance in reliability measure-ment " (Klare, 1976: 143). Klare goes on to list some of these word and sentence difficulty variables as follows