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Title Assessing Linguistic Complexity in Elementary and Secondary English Textbooks: An SFL Perspective

Author(s) Shafiq Ahmad

Abstract Linguistic complexity (LC) is one of the important indicators that can be used to assess the comprehensibility of school textbooks, especially of English textbooks designed for ESL learners. Among theories that inform researchers about the opacity of text, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) offers a convincing argument on how a diversity of linguistic items impacts LC. Moreover, systemicists have devised some standards that analyse LC more reliably. Using SFL as the theoretical framework, this study aims to explore the extents of lexical density (LD), nominalization, and grammatical intricacy (GI) within and across elementary and secondary English textbooks. Considering the three central constructs of linguistic complexity (LC), I have probed whether there is a gradual progression in LC within and across the selected study levels. The first five units from the English textbook used at each grade acted as the sample of the analysis. With the analysis tool of manual reading of lexical and grammatical items, nominalization instances, ranking clauses, and clause complexes, I interpreted the data to answer my research questions. The data shows that as per Ure’s defined criterion, some units within the five study levels do not correspond to the LD level of the written text. Moreover, the LD of some units is lower, while some units have higher LD values than the Hallidayan described limits. The use of nominalization does not conform to the suggested age and grade levels. The same is the case with GI. Hence the study has found that the selected textbooks fail to show a systematic and gradual progression of LC within and across the study levels. Several suitable pedagogical interventions have been suggested.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-02-22

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