Pre-conference workshop on readability

Readability, text comprehension and usability: cognitive and computational aspects Ever since the 1970's, readability formulas have had a bad name among researchers, and rightly so. Still, the topic of readability remains a huge challenge to the research community.
This workshop starts from the assumption that more fruitful readability work should be possible by now. First, a vast amount of empirical knowledge has been gathered in discourse psychology about reading processes and the way in which they are influenced by text characteristics. Second, developments in language technology over the last two decades have provided new possibilities for insightful ways of (semi-) automatic text analysis, which have a recently proven to be very useful in the context of readability. Finally, readability research has taken a new shape in the area of document design, with fruitful research on the usability of 'functional' text genres such as forms, web sites, instructional texts and patient information leaflets.
This international workshop brings together researchers from discourse psychology, (text and computational) linguistics and document design, to discuss and further develop cognitive and computational approaches of readability.
A preliminary list of speakers and topics is the following:
•    Danielle McNamara (University of Memphis): readability research involving Coh-Metrix
•    Tim vor der Brueck (Fernuniversität Hagen): readability checking in German with DeLite
•    Rogier Kraf & Henk Pander Maat (Utrecht University): readability prediction in Dutch with T-Scan
•    Ted Sanders (Utrecht University): experimental work on the comprehension of educational texts
•    Leo Lentz (Utrecht University): improving the usability patient information leaflets
•    Regina Jucks (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): specialist terms in expert-lay interaction and collaborative learning dyads

Further information on the program will be provided via the ST&D website (www.societyfortextanddiscourse.org/conferences) and by electronic mailings to the ST&D membership.