A Study on Syntactic Complexity and Text Readability of ASEAN English News

Abstract

English is the most widely used language in the world. With the spread and evolution of language, there are differences in the English text expression and reading difficulty in different regions. Due to the difference in the content and wording, English news in some countries is easier to understand than in others. Using an accurate and effective method to calculate the difficulty of text is not only beneficial for news writers to write easy-to-understand articles, but also for readers to choose articles that they can understand. In this paper, we study the differences in the text readability between most ASEAN countries, England and America. We compare the textual readability and syntactic complexity of English news texts among England, America and eight ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia). This paper selected the authoritative news media of each country as the research object. We used different indicators including Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (FKG), Flesch Reading Ease Index (FRE), Gunning Fog Index (GF), Automated Readability Index (AR), Coleman-Liau Index (CL) and Linsear Write Index (LW) to measure the textual readability, and then applied L2SCA to analyze the syntactic complexity of news text. According to the analysis results, we used the hierarchical clustering method to classify the English texts of different countries into six different levels. Moreover, we elucidated the reasons for such readability differences in these countries.