Updating the Fry Readability Formula.
Joseph C. Kretschmer · The Reading Teacher · 1976
ESTIMATING the difficulty lev el of reading mater al becom s important at the secondary level, as the control afforded by the basal reader is no longer available or ap propriate. While individual judg ment is certainly necessary in this task, it is helpful to have some addi tional objective assessment proce dures to use. Readability formulas fill this need. At present, readability formulas still rely on measures of sentence length and difficulty of words. Old er formulas still in use, such as those of Dale and Chali (1948) and Spache (1953), tend to be rather lengthy and tedious to compute. While obtaining the average sen tence length is not overly time-con suming, estimating difficulty of vo cabulary can take hours because the older formulas require that each word from each sample pas sage chosen at random from the ma terial in question be classified ac cording to its inclusion on a refer ence list of basic words. All not appearing on the list then be come words, and the percentage of total in the passage that are found to be diffi cult is entered into the formula as the vocabulary factor. But the ex pression percent of difficult words is somewhat misleading, as it is really an indirect way of in dicating the proportion of in a given passage that are basic words, that is, included on a list of considered most common. When Fry (1968) introduced his formula, he followed the example set by Flesch (1951) and estimated the difficulty of vocabulary by us ing word length, just as the com plexity or difficulty of sentences was estimated using sentence