Assessing Reading Text in English Textbook for Eleventh Grader Published by Ministry of Education and Culture

This research is aiming to answer the problems concerning the reading text material in English Textbook for Eleventh Grader published by Ministry of Education and Culture based on theory of good reading text (Nuttall, 2005). From three criteria that are proposed, this research is focusing to the readability and Suitability of reading text. Readability means as a term which refers to all the text features effecting how one reads and understands a book as a tool in matching the text and the reader. Suitability gives the opportunity to achieving learning goals with the appropriate text.
There are two methods used in assessing readability that are Miyazaki EFL Readability Formula and McAlpine® EFLAW Formula and both of them are quantitative methods. The readability formulas are used because they are created to determine text readability especially for EFL materials. In terms of assessing text suitability, the qualitative method is used by checking the target language covered by the reading text as the indicator of text suitability.
Based on text readability, it finds that overall reading texts Miyazaki EFL Readability score is 54.38 that can be interpreted as the reading text in the level of fairly difficult and suitable to eleventh grader. While using McAlpine® EFLAW Formula, the readability score achieves 18.89 with the meaning that the reading text in English textbook of eleventh grader is very easy to understand. In terms of suitability, it finds that, from 22 items of target language that is expected to be covered by the text, there are only 12 items which contain the target language which means text suitability is about 54.54% from overall text.