Online Graded Text Editor (OGTE)
(Note: since the time of posting this blog, the aging and poorly written software code for OGTE has sadly rendered many of OGTE’s features non-functional, including its ability to analyze texts using NGSL wordlists. Dr Charles Browne has thus gone on to create a brand new tool called NGSL Profiler which allows analysis with all eight NGSL wordlists. He has also added two additional AI-powered tools for text generation and text simplification. Explanation of the newer tools can be found from the pulldown on the NGSL Project landing page as well as in the FAQ section of the NGSL Profiler landing page )
The Online Graded Text Editor, or OGTE (https://www.er-central.com/ogte/), is a free web-based tool developed by Dr. Charles Browne and Dr. Rob Waring to assist teachers with tasks such as assessing the appropriateness of authentic texts for their student’s ability level or with turning authentic English texts, web pages and content into student-friendly texts at just the right level.
OGTE takes inspiration from previous well-known tools made for researchers such as VocabProfile by Tom Cobb and AntWord Profiler by Laurence Anthony, but with an eye towards making the tool more user-friendly for practicing teachers, authors and content developers.
OGTE allows users to analyze and write texts utilizing a wide range of popular corpus-based word lists including those from our NGSL Project (https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/), the CEFR-J wordlist, the Oxford 3000, various Cambridge wordlists, as well as the 20-level word list used both at ER-Central.com, the free extensive reading site developed by Dr. Browne and Dr. Waring as well as the Extensive Reader Foundation Graded Reader Level Scale.
In most cases, the goal is to find or create texts where students will know 95% or more of the words since research shows that this is the minimum level where students will be able to read and guess from context. Our New General Service List (NGSL) is a great starting point since its 2800 words offer an average of 92% coverage for most general texts of English and even higher for most authentic listening materials (96% for the TV show Friends, for example).
The OGTE tool is extremely simple to use, just copy and paste the text you wish to analyze (or simplify) into the main box, choose the wordlist and level you wish to use, and then click the “GO” button. The tool instantly gives you a readout of the coverage provided by the wordlist you selected, highlighting out of list words. Proper nouns do not cause difficulty for most language learners and the OGTE tool has a build-in database of 100,000+ proper nouns that are automatically excluded from the analysis. If you find other proper nouns or words you wish to exclude, just highlight the word, hit the “Ignore this word” button and the coverage figures will go up. As you can see from the screenshot, our NGSL wordlist provides nearly 95% coverage for book one of Harry Potter.
The OGTE was recently updated to include the latest 1.2 versions of wordlists from the NGSL Project including the NGSL (for general English) and NAWL (for academic English) with our other wordlists to be updated over the next few weeks. These include the TSL (for TOEIC English), BSL (for Business English), FEL (for Fitness English) and NDL (English for Young Learners). Each wordlist is corpus-based, each offers the highest coverage in the world for that genre and each is open-source and 100% free. You can find out more about the NGSL wordlists and tools at our main website (https://www.newgeneralservicelist.com/).