readability

Nowadays, enhancing the aspects of tourism industry is considering as one of the most important pillars of countries financial improvement. While urban spaces in different cities of Iran have wide verity of cultural and historical attractions which can attract considerable number of tourists to these cities, they have not meet special needs of tourists and as an obvious result these attractions could not play their key role in approaching to economical sustainability. One of the most important urban tourism attractions is historical pedestrian paths, which can have significant effect in enhancing tourists’ embracement of visiting path’s surrounded attractions if their qualities are improved. In this essay, the pedestrian paths’ qualities are introduced and "security and safety" and "readability" qualities are selected as the most important urban qualities in eliminating these paths from “must-see list” for tourist thorough analyzing questionaries’ data. Then, as the role of different urban maps (on-line, off-line and printed maps) in improving readability and safety qualities have been proved, the efficiency of these maps evaluated and their weakness and strength points investigated.

The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between cohesive readability of expository texts and reading comprehension in EFL students with different proficiency levels. One hundred students formed the participant of this study. They were undergraduate students majoring in English at University of Isfahan. To collect the relevant data, participants were divided into three groups of low proficient, intermediate and high proficient based on their scores on an OPT proficiency test. A series of expository reading comprehension tests were prepared and their cohesive readability was measured through related programs. They were divided into two groups of authentic and manipulated texts, with the cohesive readability of manipulated texts reduced. The participants answered the related tests in one session. As a result of data analysis, the findings indicated that manipulation, i.e. cohesive readability reduction has a direct impact on the students' performance in reading expository texts. It was further revealed that text manipulation, i.e. reduction of cohesive readability, was more influential on the intermediate group, i.e. positive relationship between the students’ proficiency level and their reading comprehension of expository texts with different cohesive readability levels. 

This study aimed to investigate whether there is any significant relationship between the readability and vocabulary profile including the most frequent words (K1 words) and academic word list (AWL) of reading passages of Four Corners series which were EFL textbooks. To determine the readability of the texts, the Flesch–Kincaid (1975) readability test was used, while the texts' academic word list and most frequent words which were the indicators of vocabulary profiler were calculated by Cobb's (2002) vocabulary profiler test. In order to analyze the data obtained Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficients were exploited. With respect to the relationship between readability and most frequent words, there was no significant correlation between readability and K1 words. This means that whatever the text is more difficult, the number of K1 words does not change while it was thought if the text is more difficult the number of K1 words is lower. Concerning the relationship between readability and academic word list, no significant correlation between readability and academic word list was observed, either. In other words, the readability of these texts is not due to their academic word list. It can be concluded that some other factors such as sentence length, syntactic complexity, and learners' background knowledge might contribute to the difficulty of the texts.

So far, readabilityof disclosure concepts and the behavioral features of investors have not been addressed appropriatedly in Iran despite their importance and there is not even a suitable tool to measure it in the country. Therefore, it seems necessary to conduct research in Iran to introduce the concept of disclosure readability, its measurement and the impact of business strategy on the readabilityof disclosure of financial statements. Therefore, the current paper evaluated the effect of the type of business strategy on the readability of financial statements of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. This is an applied causal (post-event) correlational paper. The statistical population of the study is all companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange. Using the systematic elimination sampling method, 129 companies were selected as the research sample and were surveyed in a period of 5 years from 2015 to 2019. EViews 9 and regression were used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that the type of business strategy affects the readability of financial statements of companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange.

In the context of the rapid dissemination of information, scaffolding the readability of online content is critical. This study introduces the brainling model as a novel approach to measuring readability, which heeds readers’ cognition, senses, emotions, and cultural background in conjunction with language. To achieve the aims, two texts covering a general topic were selected, both possessing the same readability level according to the Flesch Reading Ease scale. However, one of the texts was modified in accordance with the brainling components (i.e., cogling, emoling, sensoling, and cultuling). Following each reading text, five multiple-choice comprehension questions, a 10- item Likert scale for readability, and a scale for the text’s difficulty level scale were designed. The Google Form was used to collect responses from 209 individuals with intermediate language proficiency at an educational institution in Oman. After verifying the reliability and validity of the questions and scales, significantly higher mean scores were observed for the readability scale components of clarity and engagement in the brainling-based modified text, compared to the unmodified text. Moreover, the results obtained from the text difficulty scale, readers rated the brainling-based text as easier to comprehend. Furthermore, based on the reading comprehension test, participants achieved higher scores when reading the brainling-based text. These findings demonstrate that modifying a text based on the brainling model, which integrates both brain and linguistic structures, significantly enhances clarity, engagement, text difficulty, and reading comprehension scores. Adopting the brainling approach can be a solution for fostering mutual understanding and collaboration among culturally diverse members and alleviating challenges such as misunderstanding, that may hinder goal achievement.