Improving Literary Selection Methodology through Text Complexity Assessment for Grades 5-9
Annotatsiya
Providing secondary school students with literary materials aligned with their intellectual capabilities is critical for effective learning and fostering a sustainable reading culture. Current selection methodologies often involve subjective evaluations and manual processes, leading to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in personalized educational resource allocation. This paper introduces an automated methodology for improving the selection of Uzbek language literary works specifically for students in grades 5-9. Our approach is founded on text complexity assessment, where we construct linguistic complexity profiles derived from official Uzbek school textbooks, serving as empirical benchmarks for each respective grade level. We extract key readability features, including average sentence length, sentence length standard deviation, proportion of long sentences, and average word length from both the benchmark corpora and target literary texts. The suitability assessment is then performed by calculating the Euclidean distance between a literary work's complexity profile and each grade-level profile, identifying the closest match. This methodology offers a data- driven and scalable solution to streamline the selection process, significantly enhancing the precision of literary resource allocation for this crucial age group. By ensuring that students engage with texts tailored to their cognitive development, this research contributes to optimizing educational practices, promoting deeper comprehension, and cultivating lifelong literacy in Uzbek secondary schools.