Fórmulas de legibilidad del inglés y el español: cuestiones metodológicas

Abstract

Written language (vocabulary; the accessibility of constructions; and textual organization) is fundamental in conveying concepts to students. Therefore it is important to analyze and describe the language used in school texts. We discuss a proposed text measure; Fry's legibility indices; and attempt to establish their applicability for Spanish. The results obtained with this instrument for Spanish fall outside the scale established for English. We corroborate two hypotheses to help explain these facts: the number of syllables per hundred words in Spanish is statistically greater than in English; and Spanishspeaking writers use longer sentences. We apply Fry's measurements to nine English texts and to their respective Spanish translations; we thus can calculate the renormalization factors to try to make the instrument adequate for Spanish texts. Even with the renormalization; the majority of the analyzed texts fall outside the field of Fry's graph.