Free Online Tool Helps Educators Measure the Reading Demands of Spanish Text

Connecting Spanish-speaking students with targeted reading materials just got easier. MetaMetrics (R), Inc., developer of the widely adopted Lexile Framework(R) for Reading, today announced that it has launched a free Spanish version of its popular online Lexile Analyzer(R). Registered users can utilize the Spanish Lexile Analyzer to evaluate the reading demands of articles, passages and other Spanish texts and to determine the Spanish Lexile® measures of titles currently not in the Spanish Lexile Book Database.

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer uses El Sistema Lexile para Leer, the Spanish-language version of the Lexile Framework, to determine text difficulty. El Sistema Lexile measures text based on the same semantic and syntactic factors of reading demand -- word frequency and sentence length -- as the Lexile Framework. However, El Sistema Lexile employs a distinct 58-million word research corpus to determine Spanish word frequency values and a unique equation for calculating Spanish Lexile measures. As a result, the Spanish Lexile measure of a text can differ from the Lexile measure of the same text written in English.

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer is intended to measure professionally edited text only, including books, newspaper and magazine articles, and short stories. It is not designed to measure the difficulty of texts such as students' writing samples, poetry and unconventional writing styles, which can result in inaccurate Spanish Lexile measures. MetaMetrics advises users to follow all text-preparation guidelines posted on the Lexile Web site to ensure the validity of the Spanish Lexile measures.

For more information and to use the Spanish Lexile Analyzer, visit www.lexile.com/spanishanalyzer.