Abstract

The objective of the present study was to characterize, according to readability indicators, two of the most frequent Knowledge Genres in the Textbook of Language and Communication of the Eighth Grade in Chile: Content Exposition and Note. Indicators belonging to word, sentence and discursive dimensions, were considered to semi automatically analyze a corpus consisting of 60 texts belonging to the selected Knowledge Genres. The results revealed that, in the word dimension, the texts presented mostly short words and few nominalizations; while, in the sentence dimension, a high presence of extensive constructions and subordinate structures were identified; on the other hand, in the discursive dimension, a high presence of markers and additive coherence relations were observed. It was concluded that the texts analyzed do not fully conform to the level of reading comprehension that, in principle, the students have.