Readability Eyeball readability Informal testing (IRI & cloze) Readability formulas Reading scales

Approaches to Readability ApproachAdvantageDisadvantage Eyeball Readabilityconvenient low reliability requires experience Informal Testing (IRI & cloze) content validitytime/labor intensive Readability Formulas standard procedure empirical validation illusion of precision narrow focus Reading Scalesconvenient low reliability requires experience

Cloze Reading Levels ≥ 61%: IND 40% - 60%: INST ≤ 40%: FRS

Maze Reading Levels ≥ 85%: IND 60% - 75%: INST ≤ 50%: FRS

Readability Formulas Fry Raygor (Dale-Chall)

Fry Readability 1.Sample passages (3 100-word passages, no proper nouns, initializations, and numerals). 2.Count sentences, estimating sentence length of the nearest tenth. 3.Count syllables (put a mark above every syllable and count the marks.) 4.Plot average sentence length and average number of syllables as a point on the chart. 5.If sample counts vary widely, use more samples. 6.A word is a group of symbols with a space on either side: thus, Joe, IRA, 1945, and & are each one word. 7.A syllable is defined as a phonetic syllable. Generally, there are as many syllables as vowels. sounds. For example, stopped Is one syllable and wanted Is two syllables. When counting syllables for numerals and InitiaBzations, count one syllable for each symbol. For example, 1945 is four syllables, IRA is three syllables, and & is one syllable.

Fry Readability SentsSylsRdblty  

Raygor Readability 1.Sample passages (3 100-word passages, count proper nouns, don’t count numerals). 2.Count sentences, estimating sentence length of the nearest tenth. 3.Circle words with 6 or more letters (i.e., long words) 4.Plot average sentence length and average number of long words on the chart.

Raygor Readability SentsLng Wrds Rdblty  

Sample Readability As reading development continues, the simple strategies of using known sight words, decoding by sound analogy, and thinking about the facts of a story are no longer sufficient to gain meaning from text. Because sentences are longer and more complex, children must use new strategies to interpret text. Developing readers respond with new strategies. At this stage, fluent word identification is necessary in order to allow more thinking capacity for word, sentence, and idea meaning. Because words with multiple meanings are used in the text, students must use more than decoding by analogy to figure out unknown words. Using sentence context | to decode unknown words and to develop word meanings becomes a major task for these readers. (100 words to this mark.) Calculate Fry and Raygor readabilities for this passage.

 Sample Fry Readability SentsSylsRdblty

Sample Raygor Readability SentsLng Wrds Rdblty 5.139College 

Note areas of both charts That identify “invalid” results.

Flesch-Kincaid (Word) Sentence complexity: –# words in sentence Word difficulty: –# syllables per word Using Flesch-Kincaid Readability in Word Select: “Tools” “Options” “Spelling and Grammar” Check “Show Readability”

Online Readability Measures Copy and paste a document sample and get multiple readability levels SMOG readability levels Enter a webpage address and get multiple readability measures brief overviews of readability measures Enter book titles to get Lexile level (translate to grade level using chart under FAQ)