READABILITY ANALYSIS OF MALAYSIAN SHORT STORIES IN ENGLISH (ANALISIS KEBOLEH BACAAN CERPEN MALAYSIA DALAM BAHASA INGGERIS)

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to examine the readability statistics of a corpus of Malaysian shortstories in English with reference to a corpus of established canonical short stories written by nativespeakers. The short stories selected for analysis comprise twelve short stories published in the New StraitsTimes. The reference corpus consists of seven short stories that have been at some stage beenrecommended as texts for the English Literature syllabus in the Kurikulum Baru Sekolah Menengah(KBSM) / Secondary Schools New Curriculum. Three readability statistics are generated (Flesch Readingease, Flesch grade level and Gunning Fog index) for the stories. The readability scores of these stories arethen compared to the readability of the recommended texts on similar themes in order to assess theirsuitability for Malaysian ESL adolescent readers. The analysis reveal that both the Malaysian corpus andthe recommended text falls within the range of US grade 6.0 – 8.5 with the Malaysian corpus having theadded advantage in terms of cultural and local references.