Majlesikia, Niloufar

Analysis of Some Linguistic Features Used in ELT Internationally Published Books and Domestically Developed Books Using Coh-Metrix Tool

Abstract Using the valid Coh Metrix tool this study examined whether there weresignificant differences between the reading sections of internationally published anddomestically developed ELT books To investigate the textual differences betweenthese two different types of books as many as 60 English excerpts were randomlyselected and analyzed based on the five principal components of narrativity syntacticsimplicity word concreteness referential cohesion and deep causal cohesion Thesamples of this study included reading texts of six books in different grade levels Theywere divided into Internationally Published Books Facts and Figures Thoughts andNotions Concepts and Comments and Domestically Developed Books Vision 1 Vision 2 Vision 3 The reading texts were selected and entered into Coh Metrix TextEasabality Assessor This tool analyzes the ease or difficulty of texts on five differentdimensions The results of Analysis of Variance ANOVA demonstrated that therewas a significant difference between internationally published books in terms ofNarrativity Syntactic Simplicity and Referential Cohesion The book Concept andComments was less abstract in the structure of lexicon compared with the other twobooks Facts and Figures and Thoughts and Notions The results indicated that Factsand Figures tended to employ more simple syntax than other books and the twoadvanced level books tended to use higher deep cohesion As for the domesticallydeveloped books there was a significant difference between the three books in terms ofsyntactic simplicity The results showed that Vision 1 tended to employ more difficultsyntax The conclusion that can be drawn is that the domestically developed books aredifferent from internationally published books in some linguistics features Keywords Coh Metrix Narrativity Syntactic Simplicity Word Concreteness Referential Cohesion Deep Cohesion vii