Monday, 9 April 2012
The Gunning Fog Index
The Gunning Fog Index is is such a useful tool which calculates the readability of texts. You simply copy and paste a section of any text from a website, book, magazine or newspaper into the box and it will calculate the readability of that text. I find that this is such a beneficial way to ensure the text that you will be using in class are age appropriate for your students. It determines how difficult a text is. It is estimated that a result of 8 is needed to be understood universally and a result of 12 can be understood be a wide audience and is about the difficulty level of high school texts.
I decided to paste my previous blog-post into the box. The results showed 11 punctuation marks, 265 words and 35 words with 3 or more syllables. The gunning fog index has calculated my blog post to be 14.61, which indicates a level appropriate for university. I would recommend teachers to use this as it easily allows you to distinguish what is suitable for your class without guessing. levels one to six are appropriate for primary school aged students.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yen, it is great you have used this index. I wonder what you would get if you put children's stories into it? I put in the first paragraph of snow white and got 14.89. Can you find children's texts with a lower score? Is this a reliable index do you think?
ReplyDeleteDamian
Hi Damian, I tested a few more children's books and here are the results. Prince Cinders by Babette Cole was 6.95,Probuditi by Chris Van Allsburg is 12.87 and Baby bear, baby bear, what do you see? by Eric Carle was 5.70. These results give an approximation of the reading level of the intended audience but I think the teacher will still have to make his or her own judgements. The trend for increasing the index score seems to correlate with the number of words with 3 or more syllables and punctuation marks. Also I believe that Snow White which was originally written by the Brothers' Grimm, was intended for adult readers and not children. However, I think there may be factors to consider such as: whether written text is easier or more difficult to comprehend than oral language when something is read to you or whether children can read the text by sounding out the words without fully understanding the meaning.
ReplyDelete