Simon, Gebremedhin (PhD)Abera, Abebe2018-06-262023-11-082018-06-262023-11-082008-06http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/3494The aim of this study is to investigate readers’ viewpoints on the readability of the sports news stories reporting of the local sport newspapers. The researcher was interested in working on this area for he repeatedly observed that some readers claimed that the sport news stories were difficult to read easily and comprehend efficiently. The central point of this study is readability. There have been debates and different viewpoints among scholars on the concept of readability; factors that determine readability of a text, and the tools used to measure to detect text difficulty. It is important to note that the theoretical perspectives presented are partially at odd with the view that factors attribute to readability are still arguable. Some scholars would disagree with the argument that linguistic factors can contribute to readability. This study, however, focused only on the linguistic variables for readers’ viewpoints mainly focused on this area. In all, the participants provided five problem areas that accounted for the news stories difficulty of easy reading and efficient understanding. These include: news stories language usage, structure difficulties and omission of required information and/or details; messed up news contents structure, and incoherent news contents organization. In order to study readers’ viewpoints, the researcher, based on the readers’ viewpoints, stated the assumption that the news stories reporting were not readable due to some linguistic barriers or may be otherwise. To this end, the researcher used the qualitative research approach because some factors of readability of news text are subject to individual readers. According to some scholars, these factors are difficult to trace using quantification methods. For example, news structuring and organization and understanding of a news text cannot be measured statistically. Besides, as stated in the literature review, the processes of reading and understanding of a text are often complex, inconsistent and inclusive. It seemed appropriate to see them in the readers’ perspectives. Thus, semi-structured and focus group discussion techniques were used to collect data. Generally, as it was hypothesized, the narrative data showed that the states of the readability of the news stories were found to be difficult to read and understand easily and efficiently by all the general readers due to the linguistic factors predicted in the hypotheses, though it was at different levels. This might be for the stories were not reported in clear, precise, simple, telling, coherent, emotion enticing and forthcoming writing, and strong and grabbing news stories narration and organization. Besides, the results showed that readability is subject to various non-linguistic variables, such as readers’ prior semantic and syntactic knowledge and purposes of reading though exhaustive investigations were not made on these issues. So, results confirmed that there was a positive relation between the hypotheses and the resultsenEthiopian Sports NewspapersThesis