This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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 correspond with learners' perceptions. The work is published in the journal Reading and Writing.
First, the researchers evaluated the objective difficulty of 30 English reading passages spanning a broad range of difficulty levels. They used 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 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. Both 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.
The researchers also 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 text-level difficulty measures alone could account for. These findings indicate that objective measures of text difficulty and learners' subjective perceptions 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. Shingo Nahatame et al, Subjective and objective text difficulty in L2 English reading: exploring their interplay in relation to eye-movement behavior, Reading and Writing (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s11145-026-10888-0 MA in English, copy editor since 2021 with experience in higher education and health content.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
