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Text Readability Tools Tutorial Transcript for the AE E-Teacher Program,

sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and administered by FHI 360. This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, except where noted. To view a copy of this license,
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Using Educational Technology in the English Language Classroom

Text Readability Tools Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYCMW0qu2jc&feature=youtu.be

Lea Johannsen

Iowa State University

Lea Johannsen: Hello. In this video, I’ll be walking you through how to analyze the readability
scores of a text.
Now, the first step is to get our text. We’ll be using a text from the American English website.
Go to Resources: Teaching the Four Skills. And then scroll down to Reading.

American English website page

This work is a derivative of "American English For English Language Teachers Around the World" by American
English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored
by the U.S. Department of State.

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We’re going to be using The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is a text that Dr. Chapelle
mentions in her lecture. Now that we’re here, you can see that The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn has quite a lot of different options for download. We just want to click on “Text PDF”
download, which opens up in a separate window.

Huckleberry Finn download page

This work is a derivative of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English. This derivative is licensed
under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.

Copying text directly out of

the browser can lead to
some problems, so you’re
going to want to download
the file. You can do that by
navigating down here to the
bottom of your screen and
clicking on the button with
the arrow and a computer
screen.

Download PDF button

This work is a derivative of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English. This derivative
is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
Department of State.

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State administered

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by FHI 360 and delivered by Iowa State University
This should take it right down into your downloads, where you can open the PDF and view it
like this. Now we could just copy text directly from here. However, copying text directly out of a
PDF can be difficult, and lead to some problems, especially for the kind of analysis that you’re
going to be doing.

PDF Document
This work is a derivative of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for
use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.

So let’s take the text and put it into a text editor. Let’s go to page 2, where the text really starts,
copy some, and then open a text editor. Now if you’re on a Windows computer you’ll open
Microsoft Word, and if you’re on a Mac you might open Pages. Whichever software you’re
using, click to open a blank document and paste your text in.

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The first thing you’ll notice is that because we’ve copied text out of the PDF, there are a few
inconsistencies in the formatting, as well as some text that we really didn’t want to copy. You’ll
want to go through and delete that, and also add in letters that are missing.
Whenever you’re copying text out of a PDF, these sorts of issues can pop up. So please be
careful and go over your text a second time.

Copied text in word processing application

This work is a derivative of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for
use in the AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.

The next thing we want to know is how many words we’ve copied out. Now here, my word
editor isn’t automatically showing me the word count. So you might have to go in and turn
word count “on”, depending on what word editor you’re using. Now I can see that I have 141
words copied. That’s not quite enough. We’ll want more to be able to analyze the readability of
a text properly. Let’s get rid of what we have here, and go back for some more.

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Back on the PDF we can start
on page 2 and drag our way
down to the bottom of page 3.
Let’s see how many words that
is. Once we’ve copied it into
the text editor we can see that
that’s about 576 words, which
should be enough. The next
thing you’ll notice is that
because we copied between
pages, we’ve also copied over
the formatting that was
between the pages, like the Cleaning up text in word processing application
page number and the author’s This work is a derivative of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by American English. This
name. Make sure to get rid of derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-Teacher Program,
sponsored by the U.S.
those before you continue on
to the next step.
Another thing you’ll want to do is get rid of this sentence at the bottom that doesn’t quite
finish. Having unfinished sentences will only throw off your readability scores, so let’s get rid of
that. Now, with the text copied, we’re finally ready to start analyzing the readability scores.
Let’s go back into the browser and visit the first website (see below).

This work is a derivative of "Measure Text Readability" by Readable.io. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the
AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.

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by FHI 360 and delivered by Iowa State University
Here we are, on the first website you’re going to use to analyze the readability of a text. This
website is really easy to use. All you do is paste your text here, and click the button that says,
“measure readability”. For this particular text, we have the readability scores as you can see
here.

This work is a derivative of "Measure Text Readability" by Readable.io. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the
AE E-Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
Now let’s try the other website. The second website doesn’t immediately show you where to
put text in, so you have to click on “Test by Direct Input”. Select this, and paste your text.

This work is a derivative of "Readability Test Tool" by WebpageFX. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-
Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.
This is a program of the U.S. Department of State administered
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by FHI 360 and delivered by Iowa State University
Then click the button down here that says, “Calculate Readability”. On this website, the text
gets deleted, but your scores are displayed underneath where the text used to be.

This work is a derivative of "Readability Test Tool" by WebpageFX. This derivative is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by FHI 360 for use in the AE E-
Teacher Program, sponsored by the U.S.

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State administered

7
by FHI 360 and delivered by Iowa State University