NGSL Profiler & Text Tools

This month (April 2024) we are releasing our new NGSL Text Profiler tool (as well as two additional AI-powered tools for text generation and text simplification). All three tools can be accessed from https://ngslprofiler.com/. 

The NGSL Profiler is a free online text analysis tool developed by Dr. Charles Browne which uses wordlists for ESL/EFL learners from the NGSL Project (www.newgeneralservicelist.com/) to help you analyze the difficulty of written texts and to then simplify them to the level of your students or intended audience. It includes all seven of our previously published NGSL word lists as well as our new NGSL-GR word list for creating graded reading material..

The NGSL Profiler is based on a previous but now outdated tool called OGTE (Online Graded Text Editor) designed by Dr. Charles Browne and Dr. Rob Waring, and similar in function to VocabProfile by Tom Cobb and AntWordProfiler by Laurence Anthony. 

These types of profiling tools are often used by publishers to create graded reading texts for extensive reading programs or by researchers to establish the difficulty of texts, but with the NGSL Profiler, we have tried to create a more teacher-friendly version to help practicing classroom teachers to create, simplify or just simply gauge the appropriateness of a text for use in the classroom.

To use the NGSL Profiler, simply copy and paste the text you want to analyze into the big box, choose the word list you want your students to learn from the first pulldown, the level of the list you want to use for analysis, and then push the “Go” button. Box A will show you the coverage provided by the list at the level you have chosen. 

But proper nouns also need to be included in the coverage count as they do not usually cause difficulty for language learners. We have a database of more than 100,000 proper nouns which are automatically excluded. The % of proper nouns is shown in C and is included in the final coverage count. But there are many more than 100,000 proper nouns - these can be manually included in the coverage count by double-clicking on the word in the text and choosing “ignore” from the pop up.

There also might be some words not in the chosen list but which you as a teacher know your students already know. These too can be manually included in the coverage count by double-clicking on the word in the text and choosing “ignore” from the pop up.

The final coverage count will be shown on the right “A+B+C”. If the total is less than 90% you might want to try to simplify the text by focusing on the words in red, exchanging them for synonyms or easier words your learners might know. Keep rewriting until you hit a minimum of 90% and then the text will be ready for use with your students!

The NGSL Profiler tool was designed by Dr. Charles Browne, co-creator of the NGSL wordlists and online learning tools as well as Director of the NGSL Project. It is another free service provided by his company, CBC Consulting (www.charlie-browne.com/). It was developed as a joint project with Poodll which provides solutions for language teachers. Learn more about Poodll at https://poodll.com

NGSL Profiler also includes two new AI-powered tools, “Text Generator” for creating texts of fiction for second language learners of English, and “Text Rewriter” which helps you to simplify texts in terms of sentence length and number of words. 

We hope these tools will be of use to you and look forward to any comments or suggestions you might have for their improvement.

Citing NGSL Profiler Output in Research Papers (APA - stylesheet):

Browne,C. (2024). NGSL Profiler [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan:. Available from https://www.ngslprofiler.com.

NGSL Profiler landing page: