Recently, a Google Innovator (James Abuela) in my online community shared one of his moonshot hobby-project which he calls the Reading Difficulty Power Tools (RDPT). The screenshot of the site can be seen above. I found that it was pretty impressive as he scripted some code in Google Docs and Google Sheets to increase the functionalities of those collaborative online productivity tools. His 'beta' creations also help make language learning more accessible. (Related Github pages)
By replacing the text in the Google Docs (users need to create a copy and give permission to the scripts), one can get access to the following tools:
- Low Frequency Word Highlighter - See which words are likely to be difficult
- Type of Speech Highlighter - See different parts of speech
- Difficulty Guide - This tool analyses the text in your doc and gives you a guide to reading time, difficulty, reading age and sentence complexity.
- Low Frequency Table - This will add a table of low-frequency words to your doc to enable you to add notes and for students to look them up in the dictionary.
- A word cloud as well (see below)
I can already imagine how useful it could be to look for a suitable text for comprehension activities, especially with more technical things like Flesch score and N-grams.
For those who are unfamiliar with the aforementioned terms read the next segment.
What is the Flesch reading ease score?
The Flesch reading ease test measures the readability of a text. It uses two variables to determine the readability score:
- the average length of your sentences (measured by the number of words)
- the average number of syllables per word
Then, it provides you with a score between 0 and 100. A score of 100 means your copy is very easy to read. And, a score of 0 means your text is very difficult to read. You can see the exact interpretation of all the scores on the scale in the table below.
| Score | Notes |
|---|---|
| 90-100 | very easy to read, easily understood by an average 11-year-old student |
| 80-90 | easy to read |
| 70-80 | fairly easy to read |
| 60-70 | easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students |
| 50-60 | fairly difficult to read |
| 30-50 | difficult to read, best understood by college graduates |
| 0-30 | very difficult to read, best understood by university graduates |
So, a text with a very high Flesch reading ease score is made up of short sentences, and it contains not too many two-syllable words. Conversely, a text with a very low Flesch reading ease score consists mostly of very long sentences and a lot of complex words.
As for N-gram, you can read the following explanation from this TowardsDataScience article,
"N-gram is probably the easiest concept to understand in the whole machine learning space, I guess. An N-gram means a sequence of N words. So for example, “Medium blog” is a 2-gram (a bigram), “A Medium blog post” is a 4-gram, and “Write on Medium” is a 3-gram (trigram). Well, that wasn’t very interesting or exciting. True, but we still have to look at the probability used with n-grams, which is quite interesting."
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Moving on, besides the site, the creator also shared some useful tips like the following hack to translate specific sites using Google Translate.
"You can use the button with a urlThis translates the BBC News page from English into Malay.In the url look out for:sl=en - en change to the language the website is intl=ms - ms is Bahasa Malaysia
More codes here: https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/languages "
Another tool that I felt could be useful for teachers and hosted on a Google site as well is the UDL Tech Toolkit (I added the link to a previous article about UDL too). Read the following exerpt from the site's about page.
"My passion is to remove the obstacles to learning for all students and these free tools offer opportunities for struggling learners that promote academic success. When material is digital or electronic, it is flexible and accessible. It is our responsibility as educators to provide materials that promote success. Please encourage all educators to consider using these free tools.
When Congress reauthorized IDEA in 1997, they added the provision that ALL students on IEPs must now be considered for assistive technology. (As Dave Edyburn pointed out, 4 million more students were now eligible to be considered for AT. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 96% of students with disabilities attend schools within their districts which is the high-incidence population.)
Unfortunately, this was another unfunded mandate.
Unfortunately, this is a provision that is frequently ignored (in my experience).
Why?
Many teachers believe that assistive technology has to cost money, typically a lot of money. They tell me they are afraid to bring up AT at team meetings for that reason. Other teachers tell me that particular software or hardware is available but no one knows how to use it so it just sits in a closet, unused. Sometimes, teachers who were trained to use particular tools or devices have left the district and no one else is interested in learning how to integrate the AT. A common complaint is that the tool is too complicated or there are technical issues that prevent implementation.
I hear many more issues but none of this helps our struggling learners. Change is centered upon Universal Design for Learning (UDL) which proposes that multiple methods of :
Engagement
Presentation
Expression
promote learning for ALL learners. Flexibility is embedded within the curriculum. Learner variability is acknowledged and intentionally drives learning and instruction. The book, Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice - available in its entirety at the CAST website, expounds upon these principles and this is a MUST read for all educators. The National Center on UDL offers a number of free resources and supports for educators interested in incorporating UDL principles in their classrooms, including tutorials and interactive activities.
Change is also centered on FREE tools that are already readily available in the classroom or that are easily accessed by Internet download.
I have assembled a number of free resources that I believe should be available to every learner, guided by the principles of UDL. These tools provide improved access and accommodate for learner differences. Additionally, they are fun and engaging!"
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