Analysis of Foreign Language Teaching Methods: An Automatic Readability Approach

Much research in education has been done on the study of different language teaching methods. However, there has been little investigation using computational analysis to compare such methods in terms of readability or complexity progression. In this paper, we make use of existing readability scoring techniques and our own classifiers to analyze the textbooks used in two very different teaching methods for English as a Second Language – the grammar-based and the communicative methods. Our analysis indicates that the grammar-based curriculum shows a more coherent readability progression compared to the communicative curriculum. This finding corroborates with the expectations about the differences between these two methods and validates our approach’s value in comparing different teaching methods quantitatively.