Readability Revisited: The New Dale-Chall Readability Formula
In Readability Revisited, Dr. Jeanne Chall and the late Dr. Edgar Dale present an introduction and historical overview of the original Dale-Chall Readability Formula, its purposes and uses over nearly five decades, and its relation to other measures of readability. The second chapter of Readability Revisited presents the new, revised Dale-Chall Readability Formula which is based on a new set of criterion passages, an updated familiar word list, and better rules for measuring the two factors of word familiarity and sentence length. The authors have also simplified the instructions and computations required to apply the formula. Three worksheets included in the book combine the revised Dale-Chall formula with assessments of the cognitive and structural elements of the written material, the characteristics of the target readers, and their purpose for reading the material. Together, these provide a new and powerful tool for assessing the reading difficulty of written materials.