Non-Native English Speaker Readability Metric: Reading Speed and Comprehension

This paper presents an investigation to evaluate the reading speed and reading comprehension of non-native English speaking students by presenting a simple analytical model. For this purpose, various readability softwares were used to estimate the average grade level of the given texts. The relationship between the score obtained by the students and their reading speed under average grade level 9 and 14 using font size 12 and 14 is presented. The experimental results show that the reading speed and the score versus the students may be explained by a linear regression. Reading speed decreases as the score decreases. The students with a higher magnitude of reading speed scored better marks. More importantly, we find that the reading speed of our students is lower than the native English speakers. This approach of modeling the readability in linear form significantly simplifies the readability analysis.