Using a Computer to Calculate the Dale-Chall Formula
Jeanne G. Barry, Timothy E. Stevenson · The Journal of Reading · 1975
puters can handle character data as well as number data, a solution to the problem seems possible on a computer. The following program is designed to follow exactly the computation of the Dale-Chall Readability Formula (Dale and Chall, 1948). The program is written in Fortran, the most widely used computer language. Two types of input are possible typewriter terminal input and punched cards. Both methods are easy to use and require no computer expertise. The results of the analysis of the example in the Dale-Chall article agree exactly with the published results. We have analyzed a wide spectrum of texts from grades four through fifteen. The computation of the reading level for a 500-page text on the CDC