This tool is part of the research carried out by the members of the ADELEX team at the University of Granada. It enables the user to evaluate lexical difficulty of texts written in English on the basis of information obtained from four different applications:

 

FREQUENCIES:

 

This tool analyses the text entered by the user offering the following information:

• Type/token ratio
• Lexical diversity index
• Frequency list of the text (number and percentage of occurrences of each type)

 

SENTENCE LENGTH:

 

To help establish the level of textual difficulty, this tool provides the number of words in each sentence in the text, as well as the maximum, minimum and mean of sentence length.

 

LEXICAL PROFILE:

 

The Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer & Nation, 1995) is the percentage of words in a text belonging to different frequency levels (usually established in bands of 1,000 words each). ADELEX ANALYSER establishes the Lexical Profile of written texts in English on the basis of information contained in a 7,000-word frequency list drawn from the British National Corpus, the Bank of English and the Longman Corpus Network databases.

 

FORMULAIC PROFILE

 

This tool establishes the percentage of lexical units (individual and multiword) belonging to 7 different frequency levels. This is based on a 7,000-word count of individual items, drawn from the British National Corpus, el Bank of English and the Longman Corpus Network databases, and on 456 multiword units from the Phrasal List (Martínez & Schmitt, 2012), distributed across the 7 levels according to their frequency in the BNC.

 

TEXT EVALUATION FOR SECUNDARIA AND BACHILLERATO:

 

This tool establishes the Lexical Profile of a given text on the basis of a 2,500-word reference list designed by the ADELEX Project. To compile this pedagogical list, the members of the ADELEX Project took as a starting point the 1,600-word pedagogical list, which corresponds to the minimum receptive vocabulary a student should have when finishing compulsory secondary education, as established by Andalusian educative authorities. What is remarkable about this list is that it does not only considers the frequency of words, but also their range, representativeness and the specific communicative needs of secondary school Andalusian students.

Later on, the ADELEX Project completed this 1,600-word list to reach the final 2,500 words in order to cover post-compulsory secondary education, following the same compilation criteria. Given that educative authorities do not offer any guidelines concerning lexical contents for non-compulsory secondary education levels, the thresholds were established by the ADELEX Project considering all the literature in the field, and building a progressive increase in the number of words up to 2,500 items.

This tool has been further improved with an analysis of cognates. Thus, the 2,500 words used in this analysis have been classified as “transparent” (i.e. guessable) and “opaque” (i.e. “non-guessable”), in order to establish the percentage of English words which do not add difficulty to a text for a Spanish speaker, even though their frequency may be low.

 

References