Comparison Between Predicted and Actual Readabilities of EFL Texts

The present study attempted to compare the predicted readability computed using formulas and the actual readability expressed by the readers. Forty six students of English Department Unesa ranked five English texts from the hardest to the easiest, then Spearman r was employed to correlate the ranks from the students' perspective with the ranks obtained from the formulas. The results indicated that these two were moderately correlated, suggesting that some texts which were predicted to be hard indeed tend to be considered challenging by the EFL readers.