Readability and types of questions in Chilean EFL high school textbooks

This article evaluates the mandatory English as a foreign language textbooks provided by the government in Chile in terms of readability and types of questions. Three readability formulas are used to analyze the texts: Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and Coh-Metrix L2 reading index (RDL2). To evaluate the cognitive demands that comprehension questions place on students, Day and Park’s (2005) taxonomy of questions is used. The findings of this study reveal that the readability of the texts used in textbooks for 10th and 12th graders is similar, but the texts used in the textbook for 11th graders are more difficult to read. Regarding the types of questions, literal comprehension questions are more used in 12th-grade texts than in those for 10th and 11th grades. Consequently, there does not seem to be a progression either in readability or in cognitive demand across these grades.