French Levelled Readers
Abstract
Levelled readers have been employed equivalently in French as they have in English, to measure children's reading comprehension and fluency. Translating and adapting levelled books from one language to another presents many challenges and requires one to take into account not only the number of words per sentence or page, but also linguistic complexity (syllabic structure and complexity, lexical availability and lexical frequency). Though some information has been documented with respect to the criteria used to grade these levelled readers according to vocabulary, punctuation and formatting, no formal validation study has been performed on the French GB+ levelled readers. This study aims to evaluate whether the current and widely used French levelled readers, GB +, published by Cheneliere Éducation, are graded according to linguistic complexity.