Introduction to Text Leveling Code

History of Leveling Systems

For as long as teachers have taught children to read, finding appropriate books for students has been a concern.

Both readability and topic were taken into accountThe first leveling system was launched in the early

part of the twentieth century. Thorndike’s (1921) research on word frequency in English served as the spark for the origination of the readability formulae.

Many followed: Flesch (1948), Fry (1963, 1977), Bormouth (1975), Lexile (1997) and the Accelerated Reader Leveling system called ATOS, (2001)

The Most Popular Leveling Systems

Reading Recovery – K-2 this instructional method developed to help students who are not reading in second grade. They use teacher panels to level their books.

Fountas and Pinnell – K-8 A private company developed to support guided reading. They use a system that they created and explained in their book, The Continuum of Literacy Learning, Grades PreK-8, Second Edition

Lexile –grade 3- 12+ A private company – An algorithm that considers sentence length and vocabulary.

ATOS – Accelerated Reader -a readability formula that uses four factors: Average Sentence Length + Average Word Length + Vocabulary Grade Level + The Number of Words in a Book

Text Leveling Code The TLC process uses both

algorithms and educators to  level each book returning data that is both quantitative and qualitative. It yields  the most accurate readability levels.

Algorithms are applied to the text to

determine quantitative information.

Number of words Number of different words Number of high frequency words (words considered to be

“high frequency” increase with the length of the text) Number of low frequency words Number of long words (definition of “long” changes with

the length of text) Average sentence length Maximum sentence length Number of long/complex sentences

Quantitative information is available for each book.

Educators read the text and determine

qualitative information.

Illustrative support – (for picture books and early readers) the amount of text that may be predicted based on the illustrations

Non-fiction features - does the reading contain charts, graphs, time lines, diagrams…if so how well do they aid in text comprehension

Text Structure - dialog, unconventional format (plays,text boxes…), noticeable patterning or word repetition

Vocabulary - Content difficulty, the ratio of difficult words to easy, use of descriptive language, foreign words, idioms, Dialect/Accents, etc

Subjective Criteria that is available for each book.

Syntax - Sentence structure such as simple phrases, sentence complexity, use of captions, and word order.

Comprehension - concrete/simple or abstract/complex concepts, use of Inferences, the number of ideas presented and features such as character traits, character development, integral setting, complex problem solution, author bias, foreshadowing…

Example

Vocabulary for “Cat in the Hat”

Where “Cat in the Hat” sits among books at the same level