[chiPHPug-discuss] Lexile text level

[Adam L. <apl...@gm...>]

Hi gang,

I'm a school psychologist by day, but a PHP hacker by night.  Often,
I'm presented with problems that end up being solved much more easily
with some programming skill than with anything remotely resembling
psychology.

I'm working on a tool that will analyze a piece of given text and
provide the usual readability statistics, among many other things.
The Flesch-Kincaid grade equivalent score was easy to implement, but
another one that I would like to use is giving me much more trouble.
The Lexile Framework is a leveling system designed to help
teachers/parents/kids select books that are at the appropriate reading
level, regardless of grade level.  The formula for calculating the
level is proprietary, from that I can tell.  The only place I know of
that one can analyze a text and find a level is here:
http://www.lexile.com/DesktopDefault.aspx?view=ed&tabindex=2&tabid=16&tabpageid=335

This involves uploading a text document to their server so it can be
processed, and then the Lexile level is spit back out.  What I'd like
is for a user (me) to be able to enter the text into a POSTed form and
have that Lexile level be returned on the formatted PDF that I'm
creating.  This project has done me well for Flesch-Kincaid and
Coleman Liau (http://code.google.com/p/php-text-statistics/), but I
can't find anything similar for Lexile.

Does anyone have any experience with readability in PHP that could
help point me in the right direction?  An open-source project that
calculates the score would be ideal.  Otherwise, I'm not sure how I
could use the proprietary tool from MetaMetrics to do this on the fly.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

Adam P. Larsen
apl...@gm...