Exploring the Relationship Between Modality and Readability Across Different Text Types

With regard to the relationship between the use of modality and readability levels oftexts, ۲ opposing views have been raised. The first view endorses direct positiverelationship between modality and readability in the sense that the use of modalityincreases textual understandability. The second view is that the use of modality leadsto an increase in the number of words, resulting in readability reduction of the texts.Hence, the present study tries to first compare argumentative, expository, andnarrative text types in terms of the use of modalities; then, it explores the possibleinterplay between metadiscourse use and readability indices of the texts. To this end,۳۳ representative texts from different discourse modes were analyzed in terms of thedegrees of idea density and the frequencies of metadiscourse signals. The results ofSpearman rank correlation coefficients did not show any statistically significant gotogethernessbetween metadiscourse use and readability. Moreover, the focused texttypes were not significantly different in terms of the use of metadiscourse modalities,except for shift topic and hedging markers. Targeting intelligibility indices andstylistic devices as dimensions of textual quality, the present study offers implicationsfor writing research and materials design purposes.

Keywords:

Modality , Metadiscourse , Readability , Idea Density , Text Type