a. Dale-Chall Formula
Dale and Chall created the Dale-Chall Formula for adult and children above 4
th
grade as a way to improve upon the Flesch Reading Ease Formula. The Dale-Chall Formula was unique; unlike other formulas that
use word-length to assess word difficulty, the Dale-Chall Formula uses a count of “hard” words. The Dale-Chall Formula calculates the US grade
level of a text sample based on sentence length and the number of “hard” words. These “hard” words that words that do not appear on a specially
design list of common words familiar to most 4
th
-grade students. The following is some steps that have to be done in order to find
out the Dale-Chall Readability Formula:
Step 1
: Select a text sample of 100-150 words from an intermediate or advanced level text.
Step 2 : Compute the average sentence length by dividing the number of
words by the number of sentences.
Step 3
: Compute the percentage of words not on the list of 3,000 familiar words.
Step 4 : Compute the following equation:
Raw Score = 0.1579 PDW + 0.0496 ASL + 3.6365 Where Raw Score
= Reading Grade of a reader who can answer one- half of the test question on the passage.
PDW
= Percentage of Difficult Words
ASL = Average Sentence Length in words.
Step 5
: Use the following table to get the Adjusted Score:
28
28
“Can You Read Me Now? How to Use Readability Formulas to Write Your Target Audience”
www.ReadabilityFormulas.com , retrieved on Wednesday, April 14, 2010.
Table 2.2 The Adjusted Score of the Dale-Chall Readability Formula
Raw Score Adjusted Score
4.9 and Below Grade 4 and Below
5.0 to 5.9 Grades 5 – 6
6.0 to 6.9 Grades 7 – 8
7.0 to 7.9 Grades 9 – 10
8.0 to 8.9 Grades 11 – 12
9.0 to 9.9 Grades 13 – 15 College
10 and Above Grades 16 and above College Graduate
b. Fry Graph
The Fry readability formula or Fry readability graph is readability metric for English texts, developed by Edward Fry. The grade reading
level or reading difficulty level is calculated by average number of sentences y-axis and syllables x-axis per hundred words. These
averages are plotted onto a specific graph; the intersection of the average number of sentences and the average number of syllables determines the
reading level of the content. There several steps to calculate a grade level score of the Fry Graph:
1. Randomly select three 100 word passages. Count every word
including proper nouns, initialization, and numerals. 2.
Count the number of sentences in each 100 word sample estimate to nearest tenth.
3. Count the number of syllables in each 100 word sample. Each
numeral is a syllable. For example, 2007 is 5 syllables two-thou- sand-se-ven and word.
4. Plot the average sentence length and the average number of
syllables on the graph. 5.
The area in which it falls is the approximate grade.
29
29
“Fry Readability Formula”, http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiFry_Readability_Formula
, retrieved on Thursday, February 18, 2010
The following is the example of the Fry Readability Graph:
Figure 2.1
c. Flesch Reading Ease
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