Spanish Lexile Analyzer®

Using the Spanish Lexile Analyzer®

Overview

This document describes the Professional Spanish Lexile Analyzer, which you have been granted access to use by MetaMetrics to analyze the reading demands of books, articles, passages and other texts as a Spanish Lexile measure. The Spanish Lexile Analyzer is a web-based tool that determines the Spanish Lexile measure of professionally edited, complete, conventional prose text. Because of the way the Spanish Lexile Analyzer works, its accuracy depends on your following the text-preparation procedures and formatting conventions detailed in this document.

What Texts Can Receive a Spanish Lexile Measure?

Certain categories of text should not be measured as a Spanish Lexile measure. Because El Sistema Lexile para Leer was built upon the measurement of professionally edited, complete, conventional prose text, the Spanish Lexile Analyzer will return an inaccurate Spanish Lexile measure for other kinds of text. Follow these guidelines as you choose texts to measure:

Entire texts
You should measure…	You should not measure…
Newspaper and magazine articles Books Short stories and reading selections Passages, interviews	Student writing Poetry Multiple-choice questions Fill-in-the-blank questions Non-prose Plays/drama Recipe lists, song lyrics Instant messages, text language

Please also note that texts in the measurable category will still require text editing, as detailed in “Step 2: Preparing your text for the Spanish Lexile Analyzer”.

The Lexile Spanish Book Database

The Lexile Spanish Book Database contains certified Spanish Lexile measures for fiction and nonfiction trade book titles from over 150 publishers. It is freely searchable using www.lexile.com/fab/spanish. All books are processed with whole-text measurement using the Spanish Lexile Analyzer, and all Spanish Lexile measures are certified by MetaMetrics.

How Do Books Get a Spanish Lexile Measure?

MetaMetrics measures a book at a publisher’s request. Books are always measured in their entirety. Publishers pay for this service, as well as the right to use the Spanish Lexile measure in their marketing materials.

In order to ensure the most accurate Spanish Lexile measure, MetaMetrics’ text measurement process includes the following steps, with quality checks at each stage:

Lexile Certification Process for Conditioned Texts

Several publishing partners use the Professional Spanish Lexile Analyzer to measure their texts developmental level before submitting for a certified Spanish Lexile measure. Upon submission to MetaMetrics, these files have been prepared using our text-preparation guidelines. These files are reviewed by our recource measurement coordinatiors to assure that the editing guidelines have been met. They are then submitted for Spanish Lexile code review (Lexile codes | Lexile.com) and Spanish Lexile measures are returned to the publisher. It is only after review by MetaMetrics’ resource measurement team that these measures are deemed “certified” and then available for distribution via marketing materials, websites, and searchable at www.lexile.com/fab/spanish.

How the Spanish Lexile Analyzer Works

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer evaluates two characteristics of a text: the frequency of its words and the lengths of its sentences. Research has shown that word frequency can be used as a proxy for vocabulary difficulty, and sentence length can be used as a proxy for sentence complexity. Sentence length carries more weight in the Spanish Lexile equation than word frequency does. When you submit a text to the Spanish Lexile Analyzer, it divides the text into “slices” of roughly 125 words, retaining complete sentences. The Spanish Lexile Analyzer aggregates the measures of all of these text slices to arrive at an overall measure for the text.

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer cannot read. It counts words in sentences by automatically recognizing sentence beginnings and endings; it determines word frequency values by matching words to those in the 58 million-word MetaMetrics Spanish research corpus. Consequently, when using the Spanish Lexile Analyzer to measure text, you should keep in mind two keys to getting an accurate Spanish Lexile measure:

all sentences must be automatically recognizable (capital letter at the beginning; end-punctuation at the end; no unconventional spacing or punctuation)
all words must be automatically recognizable (correct spellings, spacing, and punctuation)

What is the difference between a Spanish and English Lexile measure?

El Sistema Lexile para Leer is a separate reading framework from the English-language Lexile Framework for Reading. The differences between the two frameworks represent the differences between the two languages. A separate research corpus of Spanish texts is necessary to determine word frequency values, and a unique Lexile equation is necessary to quantify the relationship between sentence length and syntactic complexity.

Therefore, the Spanish Lexile measure for a text may be a different number from an English Lexile measure of that same text in English. Book measures bear this out. For instance, Curious George Goes to the Hospital by Margaret and H.A. Rey measures 520L in English, and the Spanish translation measures 540L. These two measures are not relative to each other; they each represent the separate reading demands of these two texts in their separate languages.

Step 1: Converting Text from Image to Document

Instead of typing many pages of text, you can scan the pages, save them as a PDF file, and load them into an optical character recognition (OCR) program. Newer versions of Adobe Acrobat include this option:

Open your PDF scan file in Adobe Acrobat.
Under the Document menu, select Recognize Text Using OCR.
When the OCR process is finished running, select Save As… from the File menu.
In the Save as type drop-down box, choose Rich Text Document (.rtf).
Open the resulting file and check for conversion errors. Adhere to text-preparation guidelines for the entire text.

The OCR results from Acrobat can be inconsistent, particularly involving punctuation marks such as periods not being recognized at all (see below). These inconsistencies will impact the accuracy of the Spanish Lexile measure. Unfortunately the repair of a poorly OCRed file can take as long as typing the text.

A better OCR option is ABBYY FineReader, for which a free trial version is available online. Go to http://www.abbyy.com and select the “Downloads” tab. This program is not simple to use, but it does enable you to convert a complete book and quickly save as a rich text document. Files can be saved to your specified drive in batches and returned for editing review once the OCR is complete. This is typically the process MetaMetrics’ Resource Measurement follows in-house when processing text.

OCR errors

If a text is converted from hard copy to electronic format using an OCR application, some problems may occur in the conversion process. These tend to relate to the specific software used, and special care should be taken to ensure the accuracy of the electronic facsimile. Some examples of common OCR errors are as follows:

A letter “m” might convert as “rn.”
Sentence initial/final exclamation marks (“¡”, “!”) might be interpreted as a bracket (“[“ or “]”).
Verify that all the intended punctuation is in place—no periods missing, semicolons omitted, etc.
If a polysyllabic word is split between two lines with a hyphen, the hyphen should be removed and the word made whole.

Given the near-limitless possibilities of language usage and layout, these examples should not be considered exhaustive. Rather, they should be seen as representative of the kinds of things that should be recognized when preparing a text for measurement.

Step 2: Preparing your text for the Spanish Lexile Analyzer

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer is designed to measure professionally-edited, complete, conventional prose text. It should not be used on non-prose, unpunctuated, or unconventional text. The Spanish Lexile Analyzer determines sentence length through recognition of sentence endings, so sentences must be conventionally punctuated to be recognized. Likewise, the Spanish Analyzer determines word frequency by recognizing correctly spelled, well-formed words. Otherwise the Spanish Lexile Analyzer will not return a useful estimated measure.

In preparing a file for measurement, your two basic objectives are to:

preserve the prose sentences and the words within them in your text
remove non-prose content from your text before you analyze it

You should keep in mind that the usefulness of an estimated Spanish Lexile measure depends on the proper preparation of a text for analysis. Seemingly minor errors can result in significant variation in Spanish Lexile measures. See “Appendix A—Editorial Errors and their Effect on Spanish Lexile Measures” for an illustration of the influence that mistakes or improper editing can have on a Spanish Lexile measure.

Remember, the Spanish Lexile measure you receive from the

Spanish Lexile Analyzer is only as good as the text file you put into it.

Please observe the following text-preparation guidelines before you submit your text file to the Spanish Lexile Analyzer.

Text preparation guidelines

Here are some guidelines for removing non-prose within your sample text:

Within texts
You should measure…	You should not measure…
Paragraphs of prose Captions that are complete sentences Bulleted/numbered lists in which the list items are complete sentences Dialogue, sentences within quotation marks Numbers and dates Acronyms Foreign words Names Parenthetical phrases or clauses within sentences Informational text boxes containing complete sentences	Incomplete sentences Sentences with unconventional punctuation Page headers and footers, page numbers Frontmatter (forewords, prologues, prefaces, tables of contents) Backmatter (afterwords, epilogues, glossaries, indexes, bibliographies) Chapter and section titles Captions that are incomplete sentences Headings and sub-headings Bulleted/numbered lists in which the list items are incomplete sentences The leading name and colon conventionally used in interview notation Footnotes and endnotes Poetry/song extracts URLs Tables and graphs Abbreviations, including instant messages and text messages Phonetic pronunciation guides Parentheses which contain complete sentences (remove parentheses)

Additional considerations should be made when editing a text for measurement. Historical notes, introductions, “About the author” pieces, and previews of the next book in a series should typically be removed. Such text is often written separately from the main text and thus contains unique textual characteristics that can influence the Spanish Lexile measure. However, such decisions should be carefully considered while preparing your sample text for analysis. Some frontmatter and backmatter may be a legitimate part of the larger text and in these instances should be included. As a general guideline, if text appears to be written by the same author for the same audience, then it should be included in the Spanish Lexile analysis.

Children's Books

In the layout of children’s picture books, single sentences are sometimes distributed across multiple pages of a book. In the activity of reading, these page breaks function as sentence endings, so a semi-colon should be inserted at each page break in your sample file. The Spanish Lexile Analyzer interprets semi-colons as sentence-ending punctuation. In the example below from Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline (Puffin Books), semi-colons would be placed in the plain text file after the words “bueno” and “desdén” to emulate the effect that page breaks have on reading.

Web resources

When using resources downloaded from web sites, be sure to remove the non-prose and web page-specific elements, as indicated in the example below from a univision.com article:

Only the main body of the article (G) and the complete-sentence figure caption (C) should be measured. The article title (A), tagline (F), and image (B), as well as web site-specific elements such as article highlights (E) and margin advertisement text (D), should not be measured.

Also be careful to eliminate all HTML code and URLs from your text when measuring web resources.

Tests and Assessments

Reading comprehension tests

All complete sentences in all reading passages should be measured all together as one document. You should not measure sample items, directions, or the test items themselves. Depending on the format of the test item, you may also measure the complete sentences in the items in order to compare their difficulties to that of the reading passage, but do not measure the item text together with the passage text.

Writing tests

All complete sentences in the passages and the items should be measured (except directions within the items, e.g., “Make no change.”). Passages that have embedded blanks should be measured with the correct answer in place of the blank. The writing prompt and any associated directions should be measured. You should not measure sample items and all other directions.

Content-Area tests

All complete sentences in the items should be measured. You should not measure images, diagrams, tables, sample items, and directions. Some examples of content you should not measure include maps or captions in social studies tests and equations or formulae in mathematics tests.

See the example mathematics items below for a representative text-preparation sample for content-area tests.

Only complete sentences in mathematics items should be retained (B). You should not measure item numbers (A), non-word mathematical terminology (C), figures, tables, or illustrations (D), foils or answers that are incomplete sentences (E), or mathematical equations (F). Numbers within complete sentences may be left alone. It is important to note that the Spanish Lexile measure of the text within a mathematics test bears no relationship to the mathematical difficulty of the test items.

Please contact MetaMetrics directly at feedback@lexile.com if you have further questions about measuring tests.

Step 3: Convert your Text for Lexile Analysis

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer requires a UTF-8 plain text document (*.txt file) for proper processing and Spanish Lexile measurement. A plain text file is one which uses only the basic UTF-8 character set and contains no special formatting. If you submit files of an incorrect format to the Spanish Lexile Analyzer, it is possible an incorrect Spanish Lexile measure will be returned.

Note: The Spanish Lexile Analyzer cannot measure Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, or scanned image files such as JPGs.

If the source text to be measured is in an electronic document format, such as a word-processing document or a rich text document, the file can be converted into the plain text format using the settings in the application’s Save As… menu.

For instance, if your document is in Microsoft Word for Windows, then follow this procedure to save to plain text:

With your document open, select Save As… from the File menu.
In the Save as type drop-down box, select Plain Text (*.txt).
Click the Save button and a File Conversion window opens:

Microsoft Word (Windows) file conversion dialog box

4. Click the Other encoding radio button and select Unicode (UTF-8) from the list of formats to the right.

5. Also check Allow character substitution.

6. Click the OK button.

You have saved your document in the plain text format for the Spanish Lexile Analyzer.

Note: If you are working on a Macintosh or Apple computer, then follow the same procedure except save plain text documents in the “MS-DOS text” format.

Step 4: Analyze your file!

The Spanish Lexile Analyzer is accessible on the Lexile web site at www.lexile.com/analyzer/spanish/. Select the “Tools” tab, and then the “Spanish Lexile Analyzer” link.

When you are ready to measure your text, log in to the Spanish Lexile Analyzer with your username and password. The file submission dialog box appears.

Next, select Browse to find your plain text file on your hard drive.

Step 5: View your results

Select the “Analyze” button and your Spanish Lexile Analyzer results appear on a new screen.

Spanish Lexile Analyzer results.

You should print the results screen and note your filename or the name of your sample text because these results are not saved in any retrievable way. If you do not print or record the results, you will have to re-analyze your sample text.

Spanish Lexile Analyzer results

Spanish Lexile Analyzer results are provided in four categories:

Spanish Lexile measure – This value indicates the reading demand of the text in terms of the semantic difficulty and syntactic complexity. The Spanish Lexile scale generally ranges from 200L to 1400L, although actual Spanish Lexile measures can range from below zero to above 2000L.

Word Count – This value reflects the total number of words in the text that was analyzed.

Mean Sentence Length – This value is the average length of a sentence in the text, based on the sentences that were analyzed.

Mean Log Word Frequency – This value is the logarithm of the number of times a word appears in each 5-million words of the MetaMetrics Spanish research corpus of 58 million words. The mean log word frequency is the average of all such values for words which appear in the text being analyzed.

When you use the online version of the Spanish Lexile Analyzer to get an estimated measure for a sample text, please note that:

you may not publish or distribute the Spanish Lexile measure
you may not enter it into a library or media center database or catalog
your measure is not a certified Spanish Lexile measure for that book or text

Appendix A—Editorial Errors and their Effect on Spanish Lexile Measures

Proper file preparation, as detailed in the earlier section “Step 2: Preparing your text for the Spanish Lexile Analyzer”, is the crucial step for ensuring Spanish Lexile measurement accuracy. File preparation errors or oversights such as missing or incorrect punctuation or sections of unconventional prose or non-prose may compromise your Spanish Lexile Analyzer results and return an estimated measure too far from the actual Spanish Lexile measure to be of use to you.

The measurement impact of editing errors and oversights is more severe the shorter the length of the input file. For this reason, special attention is encouraged when preparing a short passage or article for analysis.

An illustration of the effects of improper editing when using the Spanish Lexile Analyzer can be seen by looking at Granjas by Sylvia Madrigal (Hampton-Brown.). When properly edited, the Spanish Lexile Analyzer results are as follows:

Spanish Lexile measure: 540L

Word Count: 762

Mean Sentence Length: 9.9

However, when the text is analyzed with five “end of sentence” punctuation marks removed, the results are:

Spanish Lexile measure: 660L

Word Count: 762

Mean Sentence Length: 10.58

Because Granjas has a word count of only 762 words, the mere omission of five punctuation marks within the text affected the Spanish Lexile measure by 120L, and increased the mean sentence length significantly.

Appendix B—Spanish Lexile Usage Conventions

When you use the online version of the Spanish Lexile Analyzer, please note that:

you may not publish or distribute the Spanish Lexile measure
you may not enter it into a library or media center database or catalog
your measure is not a certified Spanish Lexile measure for that book or text

Follow these terminology conventions when you refer to Spanish Lexile measures:

“Spanish Lexile” should always have a capital “L.”
“Spanish Lexile measure” should always have a lower case “m.”
We refer to “El Sistema Lexile^Ò para Leer” (with the registered trademark symbol) the first time that it is mentioned, and then “El Sistema Lexile” henceforth.
Spanish Lexile measures are reported as a number followed by a capital “L” for “Lexile.” There is no space between the measure and the “L” and measures of 1,000 or greater are reported without a comma (e.g., 1050L). All Spanish Lexile text measures should be rounded to the nearest 10L to avoid over-interpretation of the measures.
We refer to a “Spanish Lexile Zone” as representing the bands on the Spanish Lexile Map (e.g., the “700 Spanish Lexile Zone” goes from 700L to 790L).

We refer to a “Spanish Lexile Range” as the suggested range of Spanish Lexiles that a reader should be reading. The Spanish Lexile Range for a reader is 50L above to 100L below their Spanish Lexile reader measure. This takes into account measurement error found in the tests administered to students and in the automated measure of the books. If a student attempts material above their Spanish Lexile Range, the level of challenge may be too great for the student to be able to independently construct very much meaning from the text. Likewise, material below the readers’ Spanish Lexile Range will provide that student with little comprehension challenge. Material above or below a reader’s Spanish Lexile Range can be used for specific instructional purposes.
All Spanish Lexile measures of zero and below are reported simply as “BR” for “Beginning Reader.”