Abstract

The paper surveys the level of textual complexity in the national history textbooks for primary school. It focuses on comparing both overall level of textual complexity and its sub-parts (syntactic and semantic complexity and coefficients of density of technical information). There was used a method of Text Complexity Measurement of the learning text (Nestler-Průcha-Pluskal). The results show that the overall level of text difficulty is between 21 – 26 points (syntactic complexity then 7 – 11 points and semantic complexity 12 - 15 points). The average value of the coefficients of density of technical information was found in the total number of words (i) 8.55% and in the total number of terms (h) 27.59%. Differences between individual publishers of textbooks as a whole exist, but are not as statistically significant (with few exceptions).It turns out that the textual complexity in the studied textbooks is more low than high and it corresponds to the requirements of textbooks for the elementary school level. From the viewpoint of pedagogical practice, it appears that the criterion of textual complexity did not play a decisive role in the selection of textbooks for the teaching of historical curriculum in primary education, as the observed differences are only marginal in the overall comparison.