A New Scientific Measure of Oral Reading Ability

While Words Correct per Minute (WCPM) has been the standard way to measure how well a student reads aloud, it’s an inadequate indicator of ability. How many words a student reads correctly depends on how hard the passage is to read, but research shows passages students are tested on vary in difficulty.

How Does the Lexile Framework Measure Oral Reading?

The Lexile® Framework for Oral Reading measures the ability of a student by correlating:

How Are Passages Scored?

Lexile Framework for Oral Reading determines how difficult a passage is to read aloud using an algorithm to examine characteristics impacting oral readability such as:

• Number of syllables in words
• Length of sentences
• Word decodability, vocabulary and unconventional spelling
• Words with consonant clusters making them difficult to pronounce (such as “pterodactyl” and “enthusiastic”)

How Are Students Scored?

Lexile Framework for Oral Reading measures a student’s ability to read aloud a text of a known difficulty both fluently and accurately.

What About Students with Accents?

Because oral reading passages have been vetted and scored using the Lexile Framework, students’ performance can easily be aligned to the target text. This means speech recognition accuracy is much higher regardless of accent or speech style.

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