Readability Index and Reading Complexity in high school EFL ‎Textbooks

This study aims to investigate the readability of Iranian English ‎textbooks, Vision series 1-3, for high school. It focused on the reading ‎sections of student books and workbooks. The texts were collected and ‎fed into different readability tools such as Coh-metrix, and Flasch-‎Kincaid. The purpose was to evaluate the texts in terms of lexical and ‎syntactic complexity as well as cohesion which included narrativity, ‎syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential cohesion and deep ‎cohesion. Each factor was able to increase or decrease the load of ‎cohesion in the text. in addition, the output analysis managed to generally ‎determine how difficult the passages were and what grade levels they ‎suited. The findings revealed that there was some mismatch between the ‎standard CEFR and NGSL wordlists and the number of words the ‎learners study during their formal school language learning. Besides, the ‎texts of the workbooks were to varying degrees incompatible with each ‎other. Detailed examination uncovered some more features of each single ‎text. Assessing the Iranian textbooks may be generalized to assist the ‎international community such as teachers, material developers, and ‎writers determine what might present difficulties to language learners and ‎then take actions to improve their reading and writing skills .‎