PARAMETERS FOR ASSESSING THE DIFFICULTY OF FRENCH-LANGUAGE NEWS TEXTS WITH THE STRUCTURE “KEBAB” FOR ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

The research paper aims at establishing and describing parameters for assessing difficulty (readability, “nausea” and “wateriness”) of political texts with “Kebab” structure addressed to French-speaking adolescent readers. The material of the research is news texts selected by means of continuous sampling from the magazine “GEOAdo”, recommended for readers aged 10-15. As a result of the analysis it is revealed that the studied material does not meet the established norms in terms of readability, “nausea” and “water content” of the text. The text readability index on the Flesch scale indicates that most of the news texts (74 per cent) are easily comprehended by readers only 13-15 years old. Consequently, for an audience of 10-12 years old, these texts will be difficult to read. The parameters of academic “nausea” are overestimated due to the frequent use of key words in the news text, which favours the memorisation of basic information. The parameters of text “wateriness” are overestimated due to the compact presentation of news information in a small number of complex sentences.