Identifying the level of difficulty of texts in any content area

Today I am writing this brief post to let you know about a tool that allows users  to obtain reliable research-based information on the lexical composition and level of any text, to help them make key decisions about their text's difficulty and its overall level in relation to the CEFR. The tool is called TextInspector and it was the  winner of the 2017 ELTons award for Digital Innovation. 

You can find it here and also included on the English Profile website, which offers another   two online tools:  English Vocabulary Profile Online and English Grammar Profile Online. We have already  talked about the usefulness of these two tools in previous seminar sessions and many of you have experienced  that  they are very helpful for  both  language  and  subject classes.

Textinspector is very easy to use: simply paste any text into the box and click on "analyse". It will give you an instant score and detailed feedback. 

Texts are limited to 500 words per document. To process larger documents and to save your data, please use the advanced site at www.textinspector.com (subscription required).

To sum up, Textinspector is another powerful tool that will enable teachers  to succeed at providing their students with comprehensible input by helping them  to identify the amount of vocabulary they have to pre-teach according to the language level of our students. For CLIL teachers, the tool will allow them to have a clear perspective on the difficulty of the text on the whole although it is obvious that they will need to focus on the  subject-specific vocabulary which is essential for their CLIL units.