Het Staat in de Tekst! Tekstkenmerken als Niveau-Indicatoren van Examenopgaven Voor Gericht Lezen

The research described in this article tried to validate a framework designed for determining the degree of difficulty of a reading comprehension test. This system is primarily based on the characteristics of the texts included in the test. The results of the research show that in fact most of the text-criteria implied in the framework (interest of the topic, familiarity, concreteness, density, structural transparency, explicitness) were good predictors of the actual difficulty of the reading com-prehension test. However, in some cases, it was concluded that, besides the set of text-criteria, the nature of the reading task should also be implied in the determination of the degree of difficulty of the test. A supplementary text-criterion, i.e. linguistic means, was found to be a valuable predictor, which leads us to conclude that this one should be added to the framework somehow.