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Not all learners find the same English text equally difficult. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba found that although objectively measured text difficulty is strongly associated with learners' perceived difficulty, subjective difficulty also reflects learner-specific factors that objective measures cannot fully capture. These findings suggest that objective measures provide reliable estimates of a text's overall difficulty but do not fully explain how difficult that text feels to an individual learner.

Tsukuba, Japan—Evaluating the difficulty of English texts used in educational materials and language assessments is a central concern in English language education. Traditionally, researchers have relied on objective measures of text difficulty based on linguistic features, including characteristics of words and sentences. However, learners can differ substantially in how difficult they perceive the same text to be. To examine the relationship between objective and subjective text difficulty, the researchers investigated the extent to which objective estimates of text difficulty correspond with learners' subjective perceptions.

First, the researchers evaluated the objective difficulty of 30 English reading passages spanning a broad range of difficulty levels. Objective difficulty was assessed using both established readability measures based on linguistic characteristics and an evaluation method based on a large language model. To assess subjective difficulty, 41 undergraduate and graduate students whose first language was Japanese read the same passages and rated the difficulty of each passage on a nine-point scale. The analyses revealed a strong relationship between objective and subjective difficulty: passages rated as more difficult by objective measures were also perceived as more difficult by readers. Furthermore, objective and subjective difficulty measures were associated with eye-movement patterns during reading. More difficult texts tended to be read more slowly, and readers skipped fewer words when reading them. Importantly, the researchers found that the extent to which an individual reader's rating differed from the group's average rating for the same passage provided additional information for explaining eye-movement behavior beyond what could be accounted for by text-level difficulty measures alone.

These findings indicate that objective measures of text difficulty and subjective perceptions of learners generally correspond closely but are not identical. Although objective measures are useful for characterizing the general difficulty of a text, subjective evaluations provide additional insight into how individual learners experience and process the same text. The findings therefore have important implications for selecting reading materials that align with learners' needs and for developing more personalized approaches to reading support and language education.

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This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 23K25335 and 26K00161.

Original Paper

Title of original paper:

Subjective and Objective Text Difficulty in L2 English Reading: Exploring Their Interplay in Relation to Eye-Movement Behavior

Journal:

Reading & Writing

DOI:

10.1007/s11145-026-10888-0

Correspondence

Assistant Professor NAHATAME Shingo
Institute of Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba

Associate Professor OGISO Tomoko
Faculty of Education, Academic Research Faculty, University of Toyama

Related Link

Institute of Human Sciences