Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2013

Throughout their school career, students should be able to read increasingly more difficult texts. In this paper we discuss the importance of leveling (adapting the difficulty of texts to students’ reading proficiency), and we investigate which guidelines are available for educational publishers who would like to vary the complexity of their texts. Because of the need for evidence-based pieces of writing advice and the lack of empirical evidence for many of the guidelines that are available, we look at the usefulness of the notion of distance for varying text complexity. We apply a first operationalization of this notion (address your reader directly, add characters, avoid passives) to a corpus of exam texts for secondary education, in order to track whether exam makers systematically vary the complexity of the language used in final exams for pre-vocational (Dutch vmbo) and preuniversity (Dutch vwo) education. The notion distance proves to be useful, but is not used in a systematic way for differentiating between these school levels.

In September 2012, the NWO-project Voting Advice Via Internet has started. In this research project, we investigate, among other things, how various wording aspects of voting advice applications (VAAs) influence the answers given to the VAA statements. The current article investigates the effects of two wording aspects: valence framing (“Wearing niqabs in public should be forbidden” vs. “Wearing niqabs in public should be allowed”) and issue framing (is a statement on niqabs placed under the heading of “immigration” or “integration”?). Results show that respondents more often give disagreeing answers to negatively worded questions, than agreeing answers to equivalent positive questions. This effect occurs for about one in every three questions. The effect of issue framing occurs for only one in eight questions. When an effect of issue framing occurs, we find respondents answering in correspondence with the frame chosen: when the financial aspects of an issue are foregrounded (“finance”), respondents answer more “rightist” as compared to when social aspects are made salient (“care”).

In 2011, Kraf, Lentz & Pander Maat published a study in this journal into three automated tools for measuring the readability of texts written in Dutch: Texamen, Klinkende Taal and Accessibility Leesniveau Tool. Among other things, Kraf et al. (2011) showed that the outcomes of the three tools often differed from each other. It was not clear yet, however, how the predictions from these measuring instruments would compare to actual comprehensibility scores. Our study aimed to shed more light on the validity of the predictions from the three tools. We used the same 19 texts of which Kraf et al. (2011) published the scores from the three instruments for readability prediction. As measuring instrument for actual text comprehensibility the cloze procedure was applied. In order to ensure that each word would have an equal chance of being deleted of being deleted, all in all 95 cloze tests were constructed. In 19 of these tests, the first, sixth, eleventh, etcetera words were deleted; in 19 other tests, the second, seventh, etcetera words were deleted, etcetera. Each of the 125 participants in our study was presented with three of four of the resulting cloze tests. Possibly interfering effects of the subjects of the texts and the order of presentation were controlled for. Between the outcomes of the cloze tests (exact scoring method) and the predictions from Accessibility Leesniveau Tool and Klinkende Taal statistically significant but moderate correlations were found. No significant correlation was found between the outcomes of the cloze tests and the predictions from Texamen. Furthermore, possible relationships between the outcomes of the cloze tests and seven text characteristics were investigated. It was found that average word length and average sentence length, rather than other characteristics such as proportion of frequently used words or type-token ratio, contributed to explained variance in the cloze scores.

The present study focused on factors that predict students’ difficulties with process diagrams. From 18 compulsory national Biology exams of secondary school pre-university students all process diagram tasks (n = 64) were included in corpus. Features of the task, student, and diagram were related to the difficulty (i.e., 1- cohort mean exam score) of that particular task. A hierarchical regression analysis showed main effects for (1) the cognitive task demand, (2) the familiarity of the components, and (3) the number of components in a diagram. Interaction effects were found between the cognitive task demand and features of the student and the diagram. The final model explained 46 percent of the variance in exam scores.

In research investigating the effectiveness of letters from charitable organizations recruiting donors and volunteers, otherbenefit appeals (focusing on the benefits for others) have been compared to self-benefit appeals (focusing on the benefits for the reader). Because the benefits presented in the two types of appeal were generally dissimilar in earlier research, the current study used similar benefits for the two appeals. In addition, the inclusion of exemplars underlined the similarity in benefits. This inclusion also made it possible to compare the effectiveness of letters with and without exemplars. The experiment had a 2 (appeal: other-benefit, self-benefit) x 2 (exemplar: absent, present) between-subjects design (N = 120). Effectiveness, liking, vividness and comprehensibility of the letter were assessed. The results showed that the otherbenefit appeal was more effective than the self-benefit appeal in recruiting volunteers. Although not more effective than letters without an exemplar, letters with an exemplar were better liked. This effect on liking was fully mediated by the perceived vividness and the comprehensibility of the letter.