LiNT: een leesbaarheidsformule en een leesbaarheidsinstrument

Abstract

This paper introduces a Dutch readability formula and readability tool, LiNT (Leesbaarheidsinstrument voor Nederlandse Teksten). We f irst relate readability to the broader notion of comprehensibility, and discuss classic problems of readability research. The f irst and main focus of the paper is the LiNT-formula. We discuss how we prepared 120 texts, collected cloze comprehension data for these texts among 2700 middle school students, extracted text features and derived the LiNT-formula. This formula relates cloze comprehension to four text features, all of which have received support in earlier text comprehension research: word frequency, word concreteness, clause length and dependency length. We next discuss the interpretation of LiNT-scores, and the text complexity levels defined by it. We then examine ten well-known Dutch text genres in terms of LiNT-scores and LiNT-feature scores; and we report how text revisions affect both LiNT-scores and text comprehension levels. Our second topic is a short introduction to the LiNT-tool built around the formula. The tool aims at providing text complexity metrics to com- munication practitioners. Finally, we discuss whether our formula and tool succeed in avoiding the classic readability research problems, and how they may help to assess readability, diagnose readability problems and choose between text versions.