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& Applied Linguistics defines readability as how easily written materials can be understood. This definition only shows a general idea of readability, and it does not clarify key elements of readability (Zhao Zhenshan, 2013). Dale and Chall defined readability as the total elements within a piece of reading have effect on the success a group of readers have with it (William H. Du Bay, 2004). This definition clarified the degree of ease and takes a group of readers into consideration. George Klare defines readability as “the ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing”, this definition focuses on writing style as separate from issues such as content, coherence, and organization (William H. Du Bay, 2004). G. Harry Mc Laughlin defines readability as “the degree to which a given class of people find certain reading matter compelling and comprehensible”, this definition stresses the interaction between the text and a class of readers of known characteristics such as reading skill, prior knowledge, and motivation (William H. Du Bay, 2004). Pikulski (2002) proposed a reasonable definition of readability “the level of ease or difficulty which text material can be understood by a particular reader who is reading that text for a specific purpose.”
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2.2 Overview of comprehensibility
Readability only considers simple linguistic elements, such as sentence length, word difficulty, syllables and so on. It focuses on text itself. While comprehensibility is more complex which includes reader’s point of view. It associates the text with its readers. Marshall (1977) suggests that comprehensibility is the ability of readers to structure an internal representation of text, or to learn from text, to construct meaning for text. Cognitive theorists and reading researchers also thought that text comprehensibility was not just simple vocabulary difficulty and sentence length. They defined comprehensibility as how readers construct a cognitive representation of incoming information through the description of text features that influence comprehension directly. Such a cognitive perspective, with its emphasis on the mental activities involved in reading, has yielded an understanding of reading as a complex process in which a reader constructs meaning by integrating perceptual, linguistic, and conceptual information from the text with his or her own knowledge base (Graesser & Clark, 1985; Just & Carpenter, 1987; Kieras, 1985; Perfetti, 1985; Rumelhart, 1980; Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Based on transformational linguistics, comprehension involves the recovery and interpretation of the abstract deep structural relations underlying sentences (Bever, Lackner, & Kirk, 1969; Blumenthal, 1967, Blumenthal & Boakes, 1967; Perfetti, 1969; Rohrman, 1968; Sachs, 1967; Wanner, 1968). Previously, the importance of deep structure in sentence perception has been emphasized in many studies. In short, comprehensibility is a reader’s cognitive process of constructing the text meaning.