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Final published version
Licence: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Readability of Patient Educational Materials in English Versus Arabic
AU - Malik, Abdulaziz
AU - El Haj, Mahmoud
AU - Paasche-Orlow, Michael
PY - 2019/7/19
Y1 - 2019/7/19
N2 - Little research has been done about patient educational materials (PEMs) written in Arabic. Readability of Arabic PEMs has not previously been assessed because, until recently, there was no validated Arabic readability assessment tool. A total of 207 PEMs in both Arabic and English were collected from the Medline Plus portal. Readability was assessed using Flesch-Kincaid in English and the Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives, a new Arabic readability test. We also examined Arabic documents for other linguistic features that could lead to confusion. Mean readability grades were 6.1 and 7.1 for Arabic and English, respectively (p < .01). In 31.6% of PEMs, the English text was higher by two or more grades than the Arabic text, and the Arabic text was higher by two or more grades than the English text in 3.8% of PEMs. No diacritical marks in Arabic were used. An array of esoteric Arabic medical terms, transliterated English terms, Arabicized English terms, and written versions of spoken Arabic dialects were used
AB - Little research has been done about patient educational materials (PEMs) written in Arabic. Readability of Arabic PEMs has not previously been assessed because, until recently, there was no validated Arabic readability assessment tool. A total of 207 PEMs in both Arabic and English were collected from the Medline Plus portal. Readability was assessed using Flesch-Kincaid in English and the Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives, a new Arabic readability test. We also examined Arabic documents for other linguistic features that could lead to confusion. Mean readability grades were 6.1 and 7.1 for Arabic and English, respectively (p < .01). In 31.6% of PEMs, the English text was higher by two or more grades than the Arabic text, and the Arabic text was higher by two or more grades than the English text in 3.8% of PEMs. No diacritical marks in Arabic were used. An array of esoteric Arabic medical terms, transliterated English terms, Arabicized English terms, and written versions of spoken Arabic dialects were used
KW - readability
KW - NLP
KW - Arabic
KW - Patient
KW - Educational
KW - material
KW - corpus linguistics
KW - linguistics
KW - natural langauge processing
U2 - 10.3928/24748307-20190528-01
DO - 10.3928/24748307-20190528-01
M3 - Journal article
VL - 3
SP - e170-e173
JO - HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice
JF - HLRP: Health Literacy Research and Practice
SN - 2474-8307
IS - 3
ER -