Teacher Discussion Forums

Does anyone have any information about or experience with correlating reading passage Flesch-Kincaid levels with student levels?

In other words, a reading passage designed for high-beginner, intermediate or high-intermediate level students should ideally be at what F-K level?

Hi Charles,

I've played around with the concept of correlating the F-K levels to materials I have written for reading comprehensions. Also, I have developed a writing-checker computer program that takes readability into account when grading business writing.

Basically, at high-intermediate or advanced, they should be able to tackle any commonly found text although possibly with some difficulty. A very low F-K level would be suitable for high-beginners, but I'm not sure where I would draw the line.

The main issue that I found was that Flesch-Kincaid mainly looks at length of words, sentences and so on. In English, some of the trickiest words can be the short ones: gotta get with it, for example would confuse learners even though it is a simple sentence.

Also, if you're using the readability stats on Word, I've heard that they are not that reliable.





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