I am an LDT-C and have been asked to calculate readabilities on some of the texts used in the middle school I have a Readability Rater from Academic Therapy, but the copyright is 1977. AT does not have anything in their current catalog. How do YOU calculate the readability of a text? I don’t like counting on the publisher’s numbers. They’re out to sell books.
Re: Calculating Readability
I get a Fry Readability out of Mercer and Mercer’s textbook and take about five or six shots per text.
Re: Calculating Readability
Try this site at the top right of the page click on OKAPI reading probe generator. You can type in a passage and it will generate a reading probe and also give you the readability of the passage. I have used it to get probes at different grade levels to collect fluency data.
http://www.interventioncentral.com/download.shtml
Use the search option on this board. Several published methods were mentioned and also your Word program apparently has a readability button somewhere in it.
A lot of readability stuff is based on Gates in the 1930’s an 1940’s; a method published in 1977 is probably still as effective as most others.
Caution — all these readability formulas are skewed in favour of short sentences. For a kid who is really learning to read as opposed to memorizing, who can sound out new words and has a firm vocabulary of known words, short sentences are not that much of an advantage, and the readability formulas often give inappropriate answers because in some so-called “easy readers” ridiculous vocabulary is used in two-word sentences.
I have gotten pretty good at judging readability by eye, comparing a novel to a known series of well-designed graded texts. Nine times out of ten I can hand a kid a novel that is within his general reading range. You do this by looking at vocabulary and asking yourself if a kid of that age would be likely to have met it; and looking at complexity of presentation, how much is laid out directly and how much is left for the reader to infer.