Determining the Relative Difficulty of English Writings by Fuzzy Reasoning and Its Application to Selecting Teaching Materials

Abstract

A carefully created linguistic program is used to assess the writing styles of TIME and Newsweek.  Because of their widespread popularity, these two news magazines are chosen. The findings revealed that the frequency curves for words and characters have remained unchanged for the previous 60 years.  It was also discovered that the frequency curves include specific inflection points that can be used to identify the genre of English works.  Using fuzzy reasoning, the relative difficulty of the English writings may be determined by counting the percentage of required vocabulary for junior high and high school students in Japan.  This paper is an experimental one which aims to seek a clue to estimate the degree of difficulty by applying fuzzy rules to the frequency data.  The features of the characteristic curves are used to create fuzzy rules.  It would be a useful index to use while choosing textbooks or supplemental readers.