Why does it matter? Defining Text Complexity. "Quite extraordinary...like one of those great waves off of Hawaii that comes along every 40 years. " —Roy Romer * The Common Core State Standards Initiative places a strong emphasis on the role of text complexity in evaluating student readiness for college and careers. To follow are the Common Core Standards' three equally important components of text complexity, along with how Lexile measures can support them. Qualitative dimensions of text complexity, such as levels of meaning, structure, language conventionality and clarity, and knowledge demands. Lexile codes provide more information about a book's characteristics, such as its developmental appropriateness, reading difficulty, and common or intended usage.
Quantitative measures of text complexity, such as word frequency and sentence length, which are typically measured by computer software. Reader and task considerations, such as students' knowledge, motivation and interests. Please contact us for more information. Fulton County PPT. Analyzer® You need to register to use the Lexile Analyzer. Already registered? Please sign in. The Lexile ® measure of text is determined using the Lexile Analyzer ®, a software program that evaluates the reading demand—or readability—of books, articles and other materials. The Lexile Analyzer ® measures the complexity of the text by breaking down the entire piece and studying its characteristics, such as sentence length and word frequency, which represent the syntactic and semantic challenges that the text presents to a reader.
The outcome is the text complexity, expressed as a Lexile ® measure, along with information on the word count, mean sentence length and mean log frequency. Generally, longer sentences and words of lower frequency lead to higher Lexile ® measures; shorter sentences and words of higher frequency lead to lower Lexile ® measures. Texts such as lists, recipes, poetry and song lyrics are not analyzed because they lack conventional punctuation. Text Complexity Grade Bands and Lexile® Bands. "It isn't often that a society gets a chance to start afresh, and I think that moment is here. " —Chester E. Finn, Jr.* The Common Core State Standards Initiative offers the following overlapping Lexile bands (or Lexile ranges**, as defined by Common Core) to place texts in the following text complexity grade bands. We have realigned our Lexile ranges to match the Common Core Standards' text complexity grade bands and adjusted upward its trajectory of reading comprehension development through the grades to indicate that all students should be reading at the college and career readiness level by no later than the end of high school.
New research was released on August 15, 2012 concerning text complexity. The Common Core Standards advocate a "staircase" of increasing text complexity, beginning in grade 2, so that students can develop their reading skills and apply them to more difficult texts. Please contact us for more information. *Chester E. Rubric. Text Complexity & the Common Core | Common Core State Standards for School Leaders.