Reading proficiency is one of the most important ways Voxy measures language competency. But to make learning effective, it’s essential that the difficulty level of a text closely matches the reading proficiency levels of learners. As a result, Voxy needs to determine the difficulty level of a text as well as the difficulty level of sentences within it to provide the most effective learning experience possible.
While it’s well known among educators that a learner’s comprehension of sentences affects his or her ability to understand a full text, very little attention has been paid to the difficulty level of individual sentences. Voxy recently conducted an experiment to gain a better understanding of what makes a sentence difficult, comparing conventional measurements to more complex sentence features.
Voxy discovered that traditional non-syntactic features—elements like sentence length, total number of words, and the number of low frequency words and syllables which appear less often—may provide a more accurate assessment of difficulty than syntactic features, which are more complex. Syntactic features include who/what/why/where phrases, dependent clauses, and coordinate phrases that include words like “and,” “but,” and “so” to connect different parts of a sentence.
