Readability of French as a Foreign Language and its Uses

Reading is an important means of foreign language acquisition, particularly for vocabulary. Providing reading material that is of a suitable level of difficulty allows users to acquire vocabulary the most efficiently. Thus an on-line reading material recommender system for language learners requires a readability measure so that the difficulty of texts can be automatically assessed. However, most readability measures were developed for native child speakers of English. In this article I discuss an experiment in readability for learners of French. I conclude that using the average number of words per sentence correlates more closely with human judgements than many commonly available readability measures.