Tip:
Have you tried to find a variety of books on the same topic that reach different reading levels? Do you know about Lexile scales? Did you know that all major standardized reading tests can report student's scores as a Lexile score?
Lexile, which measures comprehension, or semantic difficulty, and sentence length, or syntactic complexity, of books, newspapers, is used by over 450 publishers. The Lexile scale measures from 80L for beginning readers to 1700L for advanced readers.
How do Lexile scores relate to grade levels?
- Go to the book database and type in Frog and Toad and you bring up a range of books in the same series from 320L to 400L.
- Type in Of Mice and Men and you bring up Steinbeck's book, whose Lexil score is 630L, and Johnson's review of the book, whose score is 1300L.
- Advanced search lets you look for Lexile ranges, keywords, and more. This could be a great way to find resources to differentiate learning.
- There is even a search for Spanish books.
- Register for the Lexile Analyzer to put in your own text or text from word, .pdf or other text files.
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