The Lexile Framework for Reading is a system developed by the US company MetaMetrics that measures both a person's reading ability and a text's difficulty on the same scale. Values are given with an “L”, such as 850L; a text is a good match when its value is close to the reader's. It is based mainly on sentence length and word frequency. The system is widely used in schools and publishing, particularly in English-speaking countries.
Reading level indicates the level of reading ability a text requires or a person has reached. Depending on the system, it is expressed as a school grade, a value on a scale such as Lexile, or a level in curricula and language frameworks, such as A2 or B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference. In practice, it helps tailor texts to the intended audience, for example customer information in plain language.
In readability research, grade level is a measure of the school year from which a text is generally understood. A well-known example is the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level, which calculates a US school grade from sentence length and syllables per word; a score of 8 roughly corresponds to eighth grade. Such scores transfer only partly to other languages, so adapted formulas such as Amstad's version of Flesch or LIX are often used for German.
The Flesch reading ease score estimates how easy a text is to understand, based on average sentence length and the number of syllables per word. Rudolf Flesch developed it for English in 1948, and adapted formulas exist for other languages. The scale runs roughly from 0 to 100 – the higher the score, the easier the text. It measures form only, not whether the content and terminology suit the intended audience.
The Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) is a procedure widely used in the United States with which teachers determine the reading level of children from kindergarten to grade 8; it is published by Pearson. Children read levelled texts aloud and answer questions about them, and the assessment covers aspects such as fluency and comprehension. The result is a reading level that guides the choice of suitable books and support measures.
