The short stories of Ly Lan and Y Ban from a view of text readability theory

Abstract

    Readability or text readability has long been studied worldwide in both the fields of applied linguistics and computational linguistics, in which the research is mainly for English and some other languages with many high application results. In Vietnamese, the research in terms of readability is still “a low language resource”, especially for short story corpus. Using mainly quantitative method, the paper surveys the linguistic factors that affect the difficulty of the short stories Ly Lan and Y Ban from the perspective of textual difficulty theory. Surveying and analyzing a corpus of 62 short stories written by Ly Lan and Y Ban, the research results show that the readability level of Ly Lan and Y Ban's short stories is mostly at the "medium" level. On the result of the research, the paper offers some applicable suggestions to use texts in appropriate grades and levels, update and supplement the Vietnamese language corpus in research on textual difficulty as well as incorporating this theoretical framework into applications teaching practice, preparing textbooks, and determining the author's style characteristics from a quantitative view.