Comparative Analysis of the Readability of English Research Articles Written by Chinese and English Native Writers

This research tries to explore the linguistic factors affecting the citation rate of Chinese writer’s research articles. We selected 50 SCI journal article introductions written by English Native and Chinese writers respectively. We measured their readability using Coh-Metrix. We then analyzed the data based on Graesser & McNamara’s theory of multi-level discourse comprehension. Our results show that the introductions written by the two types of writers differ significantly at the following levels: (1) at the discourse level, the referential cohesion score of the Chinese writer’s introductions was higher than that of the native speaker’s, indicating a higher readability; (2) at the situation model level, the deep cohesion and time sequential scores of the native writer’s introductions were higher than those of the Chinese writer’s, suggesting higher readability. Our findings also imply that although some readability indices of Chinese writers’ introductions are higher than those of the native writer’s, it does not necessarily indicate high readability literally, nor good writing quality, which could also be an explanation for the low citation rate. Moreover, the results show that the readability parameters of Chinese and native writer’s introductions differ at various levels, so it is hard to conclude that the readability alone impacts the citation rate.