What makes a text easy to read?
When I bought my book for the second book club, the information in the online-shop said: “Lexile-Bewertung 740L”. Since I had never heard the word “Lexile” before, I googled it.
I found that in Wikipedia: “The Lexile Framework for Reading is an educational tool that uses a measure called a Lexile to match readers with books, articles and other levelled reading resources. Readers and books are assigned a score on the Lexile scale, in which lower scores reflect easier readability for books and lower reading ability for readers.”
In the article they say they measure the difficulty of a text by sentence length and word frequency, but I'm not quite sure what they mean by “word frequency” and I couldn't find a proper formula for calculating this Lexile value.
While thinking about Lexile, I remembered that in Wordpress my SEO-Plugin always tells me whether it finds my texts easy enough to read. I had never checked what the calculation is based on. So I looked that up and found out that they use something called Flesch-Reading-Ease.
For the Flesch-Reading-Ease they check the ASL (Average Sentence Length) and the ASW (Average Syllables per Word) and then the value is calculated with the following formula.
FRE (for English) = 206.835 – (1.015*ASL) – (84.6 * ASW)
FRE (for German)= 180 – ASL – (58.5 * ASW)
The higher the FRE is, the easier the text is to understand. Texts that are easy to read have a value of about 60 – 70.
I tested this text online and got a value of 64, which means it's a fairly average text in terms of readability.
That's very interesting to know! Thanks for sharing!
I wonder if the creators of the Lexile Framework for Reading have purposefully kept the formula hidden since they sell it as a product to schools districts. If found an article written about it by Stephen Krashen in 2001. It's called "The Lexile Framework: Unnecessary and Potentially Harmful." It, like many of his articles, can be accessed for free on his website: http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles.php?type=1&cat=0 It's about halfway down the huge list, and it might be easier to use the text-search function (ctrl+f) to find it.
This is an interesting text.
The link to Stephen Krashen's article is http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/lexile_framework.pdf, so no need to look for it in the website.
I think I agree with the conclusion that it's (a) unnecessary and even (b) misleading (I prefer to use this term than "harmful").
A little bit more background on the (hidden) formula in Lexile can be found in http://cdn.lexile.com/m/resources/materials/The_Origin_of_the_Lexile_Specification_Equation.pdf. In my opinion, these are very simple formulas for a quite complex phenomenon (reading comprehension) and therefore, again, just not meaningful. There is surely more to it that just sentence length and word count.
CloudyDe: By "word frequency" they mean what in German you call "Worthäufigkeit". It's just the number of words in a given text, for every word. The number of ocurrences/repetitions of a word.
@Roxanne, @Linda: Thanks for the corrections.
@MinimusTiro, @Eduard: Thanks for the links.
@Eduard: Yep, I also found that this is a (too) simple answer to a complex question. And, questions bear questions, now I am curious how they assign levels to those EasyReaders for language learner. (These A1, A2, B1 ... levels). I think there must be a check against a basic vocabulary list as well and maybe a check against complicated grammar structures or non-beginner-tenses.
Yes, that's an interesting question. Years ago I bought a German dictionary for foreigners that marked some words with the
B2tag (and maybe others as well, I don't remember). By then I asked myself how they match "vocabulary" to a "language level" at all. Even this sort of mapping I find dubious, since words have different meanings, usages, etc.Edit: This is one of the newer editions of the mentioned dictionary. It looks like the markings are gone.
Ok, since I was curious about it, I just googled it. And indeed: For the B1 level there is for example this list of words from the Goethe Institut: https://www.goethe.de/pro/relaunch/prf/de/Goethe-Zertifikat_B1_Wortliste.pdf
Edit: There is also one for A1: https://www.goethe.de/pro/relaunch/prf/de/A1_SD1_Wortliste_02.pdf