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Usborne is to publish a new children's reading level classification, the Lexile measure, on the covers of a wide range of its titles. The development comes after UK school test provider GL Assessment signed a deal with US company MetaMetrics last month to bring its Lexile Framework for Reading to the UK.
The Lexile is the standard measure of children's reading ability in 22 US states. It can be used to assess a child's performance, and also to develop his or her reading skill by indicating which books are appropriate to advance the child further.
More than 115,000 books in the US have been ranked using the measure. "The Lexile of any book measures its syntactical density and semantic difficulty—how long the sentences are, and how difficult the words are," said GL Assessment's Graham Taylor. "It is the only scientifically precise and defendable measure of a child, or of a particular book, and it starts from the very earliest years and goes up to PhD level. It can be used to give kids something to read which is a bit of a stretch but not too testing—something which will push kids forward, but not too hard."
Taylor said GL Assessment would be offering the Lexile test for children from September. The company is talking to all children's and education fiction and non-fiction publishers which sell to schools about printing Lexile measures on its book covers, he added.