In this regard, through decades of educational practice, the United States has developed quite mature in graded reading, with perfect and diverse grading methods and standards. Let me first introduce two most commonly used reading grading systems, so that parents can find the original English books suitable for their children when choosing books for them. Due to the long space, only the Lexile Lance grading system will be introduced today, and the AR grading system will be introduced in the next article.
1. What is this?
Lexile reading evaluation system was developed in 15 by Metametircs, Inc. Education Company with the support of National Institutes of Health. The web address is/. Lexile scoring system is the most widely used reading scoring system in the United States. In the United States, 50 States use Lexile reading assessment system, covering about 50% of students in the United States. At present, nearly 250 thousand books have been included in the grading system.
Lexile is a unit used to measure readers' reading level and the difficulty of identifying publications. Simply put, Lance (L) is a difficulty unit. One thousandth of the gap between reading elementary books and reading encyclopedias is defined as1L. Personally, it is one thousandth of the difference between the maximum value and the minimum value, and the highest score of Reims is1700 L.
Lance index simply evaluates the difficulty of the text. This text difficulty is based on two core language difficulty indicators.
Word frequency
Sentence length (sentence length)
Word frequency refers to the number of words contained in the text and the frequency of their appearance in the corpus, which is a direct requirement for learners' vocabulary. This is easy for everyone to understand. The length of a sentence is directly related to the grammatical difficulty of the article. One of the reasons why philosophy books are difficult to understand is that sentences are very long and grammar overlaps frequently. This phenomenon is the same in both Chinese and English books. Once it needs to be understood by dividing sentence components, the difficulty can be imagined. Of course, the difficulty of words and grammar often has a strong correlation with the difficulty of content.
2. How to inquire in official website?
(1) Query the blue index of a book.
Enter the title, author or publication number in the quick book search in the upper right corner of official website, and you can search out the corresponding information of the book and its blue index.
In a query, sometimes you will see some letter combinations before numbers, which have the following meanings:
Parental guidance manual for adult guidance. This kind of reading materials are generally picture books with words, which are suitable for parents to read with preschool children.
NC = Non-compliant and unconventional books. The language difficulty of such reading materials generally exceeds the reading ability of the target readers. Suitable for readers with medium reading ability or above.
HL = high and low books with high interest but low difficulty. Suitable for senior students with low reading ability.
IG=IllustratedGuide。 Usually an encyclopedia.
GN=GraphicNovel comic book or comic book.
Start reading. Elementary reading.
Np = non-prose article. Such as poetry, lyrics or recipes. This kind of article can't evaluate lance.
(2) How to find books suitable for children?
Method 1: If you know your child's reading blue index, go directly to your blue index or scoring area, and then a "theme" box will appear (including adventure, animals and nature, art and music, classic literature, science fiction, inserted novels and comics, history, mythology, human geography, romantic stories, science and technology, sports health and other categories), and you can check the content you are interested in to search.
Method 2: If you don't know the blue index of children's reading, you can find an English book that children can easily read, and then you can roughly estimate the children's reading index by querying the blue index of this book.
Next, according to the following table, we can roughly infer the corresponding grades of children, roughly understand the reading ability that American students should have in each grade, and then choose suitable books for children.
3. How to accurately test children's blue index?
Take the well-designed Lexile standardized exam. The Lance website does not provide tests. It cooperates with many institutions and has been introduced to China. TOEFL junior is also a partner of Lexile, providing a level reference for foreign students whose mother tongue is not English.
Therefore, if you know the children's reading blue index, then this interval can float up by 50L and down by 100L. For example, Lexile, if the index is 800L, then 700L-850L reading materials are most suitable for you.
4. What does the 75% gold comprehension rate of Lance Index mean?
Suppose your Lance index is 1000L, you can read the English materials of 1000L without any outside help (without consulting the dictionary), and you can read about 75% of the articles. So it doesn't mean that people who read 1000L can read 1000L. This ratio of being able to read 75% is called your current target reading material.
Being able to read 75% of the materials independently can make readers fully understand the content of the text, and at the same time, they will encounter some necessary reading challenges. In this proportion, readers will not encounter any new words and grammatical structures, because the text is too simple, so it is difficult to help learners improve their language level; Nor will you feel depressed because the text is too difficult to understand the basic information. So it can be called the golden understanding rate.
Even if lance index is not used, this difficulty setting principle is of great guiding significance for us to arrange learning materials.