Lexiles: What’s this?

1. Lexiles: What’s this? Dr. Beth Frye Dr. Woody Trathen Appalachian State University http://asulexile.wordpress.com/

2. Lexiles Developed and marketed to match readers to texts—reading levels • Lexile Measures • A readability estimate of a text (text level) • Materials are leveled with a readability formula • Lexile Scores • An estimate of a student’s developmental reading ability (reader level) • EOG scores include a lexile score for a student

3. Organization of Presentations Day One: • What Research Tells Us About Teaching Reading • Text Measures--Readability Day Two: • Student Scores • How to Assess Students’ Reading Levels • Current Research on Assessment Day Three: • Current Research on Assessment • Instructional Approaches

4. What Research Says

5. Important Components of Upper-Elementary and Middle-Level Reading Instruction Match students’ reading levels to appropriate leveled text—encourage students to read instructional-level texts and avoid placing students in frustration-level texts. Provide daily opportunities for students to read silently for extended periods of time; by doing so, students develop reading stamina and increase their volume of reading.

6. Instructional-Level Texts • More than a half century ago, Betts (1946) developed informal assessment tasks (word recognition and passage reading inventories) that have served clinicians and teachers well. The assessments are used to determine a reader’s instructional level, with the hope of matching appropriate texts to the reader’s skill. • Betts often referred to the numerous factors teachers must take into consideration when determining a reading instructional level.

7. Instructional-Level Texts • This complexity led him to coin the term probable instructional level, which he described as “…the level where instruction can be given to satisfy learner needs” (Betts, 1946, p. 447). He wrote: • …maximum development is not likely to accrue when the learner is given a diet of reading materials dealing with facts and expressed in a language that does not challenge his best intellectual endeavors. In short, it is imperative that a teacher or a clinician should have some systematic means of appraising a learner’s general level of achievement. Maximum development may be expected when the learner is challenged but not frustrated(pp. 447-448).

8. Instructional-Level Texts • Chall, Jacobs and Baldwin (1990) pointed out that a strong factor influencing low-income children’s reading achievement is the level of difficulty of the materials used for instruction. • Chall recommended that, for guided reading instruction, students read at a “challenging level”—not too hard and not too easy. Chall et al.’s findings indicated that students who read material at a “challenging level” made gains in word recognition, comprehension, and word meanings. Her “challenging level” seems to be consistent with Betts’s instructional reading level.

9. Instructional-Level Texts and Reading Volume • Allington (2001) has stressed the need to match text to students’ reading abilities: • “Kids not only need to read a lot but they also need lots of books they can read right at their fingertips. They also need access to books that entice them, attract them to reading…Schools without rich supplies of engaging, accessible, appropriate books are not schools that are likely to teach many children to read at all, much less develop thoughtful literacy in most students.” (pp. 68-69 emphasis added) • Allington (2007) reiterated that struggling readers do not make appropriate gains in reading because they are taught with texts that are too hard, texts they cannot read.

10. Instructional-Level Texts + Volume of Reading = Increased GROWTH and Motivation • In matching students to instructional-level texts, the teacher aims to increase students’ word recognition automaticity and comprehension (including literary analysis), as well as improving their motivations for reading and academic self-esteems. • The impact of motivation on the reading process is well documented; (Guthrie, Wigfield, Metsala & Cox, 1999), and we know the effects are reciprocal. • Spear-Swerling and Sternberg (1998) maintain that lowered expectations, lowered levels of reading practice, and lowered motivation are three negative factors affecting children with reading disabilities. • As educators, we need to challenge these negative factors by appropriately pacing low readers through instructional-level material of high literary quality. These students with reading difficulties need instruction matched to their level of reading development (Curtis & Longo, 1998).

11. Supporting Research… • O’Connor, Bell, Harty, Larkin, Sackor, and Zigmond (2002) found that teaching struggling readers in the intermediate grades with reading-level matched texts (i.e. at the correct instructional level) produced substantial growth in reading fluency. Conversely, these researchers reported that students taught with classroom-level-matched texts (or grade-level materials) did not improve their reading fluency. Furthermore, the struggling readers who were taught with grade-level texts did not make stronger comprehension gains. • In accordance, Mathes, Denton, Fletcher, Anthony, Francis, and Schatsneider (2005) reported that when “high-quality classroom-level” reading instruction was conducted in tandem with intense, supplemental small-group interventions, struggling readers made gains in reading.

12. So…What If Students DON’T Read Appropriate Texts? • Given material that is too difficult to read, few students are able to sustain interest and motivation (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997; Ivey, 1999; Strickland, Ganske & Monroe, 2001). • Over time, this restricted reading practice contributes to deficits in vocabulary, fluency, and content knowledge (Stanovich, 1986; Nathan & Stanovich, 1991). • Stanovich’s (1986) application of Matthew 25:29- “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” • The Matthew Effect…

13. Why Is VOLUME of Reading Important?(See Cunningham and Stanovich, 2001) • Many researchers maintain that reading volume, rather than oral language, is the prime contributor to individual differences in children’s vocabularies (Hayes, 1988; Hayes & Ahrens, 1988; Nagy & Anderson, 1984; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Stanovich, 1986). • One of the most consistent findings in reading research is that students’ vocabulary knowledge correlates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success (see Baumann, Kame‘enui, & Ash, 2003). • Over the past few decades, the consensus among researchers is that students add approximately 2,000 to 3,500 distinct words yearly to their reading vocabularies (Anderson & Nagy, 1992; Beck & McKeown, 1991).

14. So…how do students acquire the meanings of these 3,000 “unique” words each year? • To teach 3000 words over the 180-day school year would mean teaching/learning 17 new words each day. Reviews of intervention studies suggest that only 8-10 words can be effectively taught each week, adding up to roughly 400 words a year (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). Explicit vocabulary instruction is necessary for words crucial to the understanding of a literature selection or a content area concept and for teaching word-learning strategies. • And the remaining 2,600 words? Learned through incidental learning, including wide reading. The National Reading Panel (2000) reports: Much of a student’s vocabulary will have to be learned in the course of doing things other than explicit vocabulary learning. Repetition, richness of context, and motivation may also add to the efficacy of incidental learning of vocabulary (p. 4-4).

15. Wide Reading Vocabulary Growth • If Caleb, a 5th-grade student, reads for an hour each day, five days a week (in school), at an average silent rate of 175 words per minute, he will encounter 1, 890, 000 words in his reading over a school year. • [175 wpm X 60 minutes=10,500] • [10,500 words X 180 days=1, 890, 000] • If 2 to 5 percent of the words Caleb encounters are unknown to him, he will encounter from 37,800 to 94,500 unknown words. • If, as research has shown, students can learn between 5-10 percent of previously unknown words from a single reading, Caleb will learn, at minimum, 1,890 new words each year from his reading…

16. Written vs. Oral Language • Hayes and Ahrens (1988) report distributions of words found in oral language differ from those found in written language. These ranks were reported in terms of word frequency (out of 86,741 different word forms in English according to their frequency of occurrence in a large corpus of written English) and rare words per 1000. A rare word is a word typically outside the vocabulary of a 4th-6th grader. • So, for example, the average word in children’s books was ranked 627thmost frequent in the Carroll et al. word count and the average word in adult books was ranked the 1058th most frequent. • Contrast the findings with those in oral language: the average frequency of the words in all the samples of oral speech hovers in the 400–600 range of ranks. • In addition, the rarity of the words in children’s books is greater than that in all of the adult conversation, except for courtroom testimony. Furthermore, the words used in children’s books are considerably rarer than those in the speech on prime-time adult television.

17. Oral versus Written Language

18. Implications for Vocabulary Development • As Cunningham and Stanovich (2001) point out, these findings have important implications for vocabulary development: • “If most vocabulary is acquired outside of formal teaching, then the only opportunities to acquire new words occur when an individual is exposed to a word in written or oral language that is outside his/her current vocabulary… For vocabulary growth to occur after the middle grades, children must be exposed to words that are rare…Again, it is print that provides many more such word-learning opportunities” (p. 130-140). • Cunningham and Stanovich (2001) emphasize that differences in lexical richness between speech and print are a major source of individual differences in vocabulary development. • A few examples…whereas we might say our dog jumped into the cold water, a character in a children’s book might say the dog plunged into the frigidflowing river. We may refer to feeling sad, but in a children’s book, the character may be feeling melancholy or blue or possibly even lugubrious. We may refer to crying, but in the children’s book, the character may be wailing with fear. • Students need multiple encounters with rare words if they are to acquire the vocabulary that will enable them to comprehend increasingly complex school texts.

19. Classroom Implications • Cunningham and Stanovich (2001) recommend the following: • Reading a lot will enhance verbal intelligence; yes, reading will make you smarter. • We should provide students with as many reading experiences as possible, especially those students whose verbal abilities need support. • We may not be able to change the students’ abilities, but we know that the habit of READING will itself develop abilities.

20. Matching Readers to Texts In order to match readers to texts we must: • Assess the reading level of the readers • Assess the readability level of the texts Then we can match the two.

21. Text Readability What makes a text more or less difficult to read? Let’s take a look…

22. Factors Related to Text Difficulty • Vocabulary (Words) • Sentence Complexity (Punctuation) • Genre • Text Structure • Content, Themes and Ideas • Language and Literary Features • Book and Print Features

23. Readability Indexes • What they are: Predictive devices (formulas) intended to provide quantitative, objective estimates of the reading difficulty of text • What they do: Provide users with a way to compare, and presumably match, readers’ ability levels to the difficulty levels of written material • Most readability formulas only involve two variables • Semantic factors (words) • Length (number of syllables or number of long words) • Frequency (number of low frequent words) • Syntactic factors • Sentence length (number of sentences)

24. Readability Formulas • http://www.ideosity.com/SEO/SEO-Readability-Tests.aspx • Fry (grade level graph) • 3 sample passages 100 words, # syllables, # sentences • Raygor (grade level graph) • 3 sample passages 100 words, # words 6 + letters, # sentences • Dale Chall (run program to calculate) • Word frequency and sentence length • Spache: best for texts 3rd grade level and below (run calculator) • Word frequency (children’s books) and sentence length • http://www.lefthandlogic.com/htmdocs/tools/okapi/okapi.php • Carver and Singer (train raters) • Matching a passage against an anchor set of passages (rater judgment) • Lexile (run program to calculate) • Word frequency and sentence length • http://lexile.com/analyzer/

26. Fry Readability Index • Randomly select 3 separate 100 word passages. (Count every word including proper nouns, initializations, and numerals.) • Count the number of sentences in each 100 word sample (estimate to nearest tenth). • Count the number of syllables in each 100 word sample. (Each numeral is a syllable. For example, 2007 is 4 syllables and one word.) • Plot the average sentence length and the average number of syllables on the graph. • The area in which it falls is the approximate grade

27. Fry Readability Index

28. Raygor Readability Index • Use a 100-word passage from the selection. Use more than one if passage is long (minimum of 3). • Count the number of sentences in each passage. Count a half sentence as .5. • Count the number of words in each passage containing six or more letters. • Find the point on the Raygor Estimate Graph.

29. Raygor Readability Index

32. Readability of Texts • Use with caution. These are estimates that represent a range. Do not be too literal or inflexible in interpreting the levels • Do not rely on one index—use several • Book Source: • http://www.booksource.com/ • Guided Reading: • http://www.fountasandpinnellleveledbooks.com/ • http://home.comcast.net/~ngiansante/ • AR: • http://www.arbookfind.com/default.aspx • Scholastic: • http://bookwizard.scholastic.com/tbw/homePage.do • Lexile: • http://lexile.com/fab/

33. Lexile: Approximate Grade Level Index

34. Conversion Charts for Readability Indexes • Lexile to Guided Reading conversion • Lexile to AR grade level conversion • Harcourt Lexile to grade level conversion • Lexile to Reading Recovery grade level

35. References Allington, R. (2001). What really matters for struggling readers: Designing research-based programs. New York: Addison, Wesley, Longman. Allington, R. (2007). Intervention all day long: New hope for struggling readers. Voices from the Middle,14(4), 7-14. Anderson, R. C., & Nagy, W. E. (1992). The vocabulary conundrum. American Educator, 16, 14-18, 44-47.  Baumann, J. F., Kame‘enui, E. J., & Ash, G. E. (2003). Research on vocabulary instruction: Voltaire redux. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire, & J. M. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook on research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed., pp. 752-785). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Beck, I. L., & McKeown, M. G. (1991). Conditions of vocabulary acquisition. In R. Barr, M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. D. Pearson (Eds.), Handbook of reading research, (Vol. 2, pp. 789-814). New York: Longman. Betts, E. (1946). Foundations of reading instruction. New York: American Book Company. Chall, J.S., & Conrad, S.S. (1991). Should textbooks challenge students? New York: Teachers College Press. Chall, J. S., and Curtis, M. E. (2003). Children with reading difficulties. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire, and J. M. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed.). (pp. 413-420). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Chall, J.S., Jacobs, V.A., & Baldwin, L.E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cunningham A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (2001)What reading does for the mind. Journal of Direct Instruction, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 137–149. Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33, 934-945. Curtis, M.E., & Longo, A.M. (1998). When adolescents can’t read: Methods and materials that work. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. Gelzheiser, L. M. (2005). Maximizing student progress in one-to-one programs: Contributions of texts, volunteer experience, and student characteristics. Exceptionality, 13(4), 229–243. Guthrie, J.T., Wigfield, A., Metsala, J.L., & Cox, K.E. (1999). Motivational and cognitive predictors of text comprehension and reading amount. Scientific Studies of Reading, 4(3), 231-256. Hayes, D. P. (1988). Speaking and writing: Distinct patterns of word choice. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 572–585. Hayes, D. P. & Ahrens, M. (1988). Vocabulary simplification for children: A special case of ‘motherese.’ Journal of Child Language, 15, 395–410. Ivey, G. (1999). A multicase study in the middle school: Complexities among young adolescent readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 34 (2), 172-192. Kane, G. R. (1984). Readability. In Pearson, P.D., Barr, R., Kamil, M.L., & Mosenthal, P.B. (Eds.). Handbook of reading research: Volume I. White Plains, NY: Longman. Mathes, P. G., Denton, C. A., Fletcher, J. M., Anthony, J. L., Francis, D. J., & Schatsneider, C. (2005). The effects of theoretically different instruction and student characteristics on the skills of struggling readers. Reading Research Quarterly,40(2), 148– 182. Morris, D. (2008). Diagnosis and correction of reading problems. New York: The Guilford Press.

36. References Morris, D., Bloodgood, J., Perney, J., Frye, E., Kucan, L., Trathen, W., Mock, D., & Schlagal, B. (In Press) Validating craft knowledge: An empirical examination of elementary-grade students’ performance on an informal reading assessment.Elementary School Journal. Nagy, W. E., & Anderson, R. C. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English? Reading ResearchQuarterly, 19, 304–330. Nagy, W. E., Herman, P. A. (1987). Breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M. G. McKeown & M. E. Curtis (Eds.), The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 19–35). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Nagy, W. E., Herman, P. A. & Anderson, R. C. (1985). Learning words from context. Reading ResearchQuarterly, 20, 233–253. Nathan, R. G. & K. E. Stanovich. 1991. The causes and consequences of differences in reading fluency. Theory Into Practice,30(3), 176-184. O’Connor, R. E., Bell, K. M., Harty, K. R., Larkin, L. K., Sackor, S. M., & Zigmond, N. (2002). Teaching reading to poor readers in the intermediate grades: A comparison of text difficulty. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 474–485. Pinnell, G. S. & Fountas, I. C. (2002). Leveled Books for Readers Grades 3-6: A Companion Volume to Guiding Readers and Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Spear-Swerling, L., & Sternberg, R. (1998). Off Track: When poor readers become “learning disabled.” Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stahl, S. A. (1999). Vocabulary development. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. Stahl, S. A., & Fairbanks, M. M. (1986). The effects of vocabulary instruction: A model-based meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 56, 72-110. Stanovich, K.E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.