Decodability analysis to guide revision
You’ll find below a “tool” for doing a decodability analysis of texts in terms of the TAP phonics levels. This tool is experimental and in development and shared here “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied.ย Nonetheless, the results can highlight words in a text that may be above a target TAP level.ย We use it to guide revision of our decodable novels (aka levelled phonics readers) for older learners.
Completely Private
You may also enjoy reading this blog post which outlines how the tool works and was built.ย It is probably important to mention that the analysis is done in the browser and our server doesn’t collect or even see the text you enter in the tool.
Again, the phonics progression used in our decodable novels (aka levelled phonics readers) for older beginning readers is presented in detail here: phonics levels. The tool takes the text from the text area and displays it below the text area such that words above the target level will stand out and be larger the higher their level is above the target level. The result are styled as follows:
- words at or below the specified level: dimly visible.
- words not found in the tool’s word list: yellow, italics
- some frequent words (dimmed, italics):ย are, be, do, has, he, his, i, is, of, one, said, she, the, then, they, to, too, two, was, were, when, who, why
- lastly, as this tool is still being developed and the upper levels of TAP are not yet carved in stone, there are GPC’s (grapheme-phoneme correspondences) that have simply been placed in the “??” level.ย Words that require these GPC’s get their normal highlighting but are also in italics.
The Decodability Analysis Tool in All Its (Beta) Glory
[decodability-tool]
Version 1.1.ย Last updated March 20, 2018.
Moved spelling-sound pairs from Level ??
Added “show level” option