Examining the effect of readability on comprehensibility by different types of text

This study aimed to examine the effect of readability on comprehensibility by different types of text. To this end, two informative and two narrative texts, of which readability were calculated, were abbreviated in terms of their sentence lengths in consideration of their context principles. This procedure affected the readability scores of the texts directly, and easier texts were obtained in terms of readability scores compared to their original versions. This is an experimental research which aimed to see how systemic changes in the independent variable affected the dependent variable. As the random assignment was not possible in the study, The non-equivalent control group quasi-experimental design was preferred. The study group was chosen with the convenience sampling method. Accordingly, a primary school in the central district of Düzce province was preferred for its accessibility and proximity to the researcher. Following the decision on the school of research, 4 classrooms which did not differ by comprehension levels were selected with the purposive sampling method. The study group consisted of 121 fourth-grade students. Two narrative and two informative texts were utilized to collect the research data, and the Informal Reading Inventory to measure the comprehensibility of these text. The readability of the texts was calculated using the Ateşman formula. The data were analyzed in SPSS 24 software package. The Lilliefors-corrected Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test was used to measure the normality of the data, and Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used to compare the nonparametric groups, and the Related Samples T-Test was used to compare the parametric groups. At the end of the analysis of the research data, it was seen that the original versions of the texts were better comprehended than their versions simplified by the researchers. It can be argued in the light of the findings that change in readability scores of texts affect their comprehensibility. In other words, it can be argued that the increase in the readability of the texts has a negative impact on the process of meaning construction from the text of the readers.