Luxfield Text Grading and Editing Services
Case Studies
1: Graded readers: revision and regrading
A publisher asked for an existing series of about 60 graded texts (readers for Secondary schools) to be revised. A new grading scheme was written, old vocabulary lists were revised, and then each of the 60 texts were checked one by one. Texts which diverged from the scheme were adjusted.
It was found that almost all texts had a much greater vocabulary divergence from original scheme lists than had been supposed but it was relatively easy to set this right. Almost all texts were longer or shorter than required according to the new scheme and needed extension or reduction. Some failed quite seriously in this respect and had to be virtually re-written.
The adjusted and rewritten texts were passed to an in-house editor for copy-editing.
2: Graded readers: development (1)
Later the same publisher (at 1) decided to increase the number of texts in the series, and commissioned further titles: these were done by a number of authors.
In this situation when any author's work was received it was checked by the in-house editors to ensure that it matched basic requirements of length and completeness and then passed to Luxfield for analysis. If roughly right the texts were adjusted where necessary and returned to the editor with a report on what had been found and what had been done.
The in-house editor was alerted to texts that proved to be wildly wrong. In these cases the matter was then taken up with the author, or a rewrite was commissioned.
3: Graded readers: development (2)
A publisher commissioned Luxfield to undertake work on much the same lines as at 2. The scheme and word lists for a new 24-title Secondary-school readers series were devised. The work the authors sent in was checked by Luxfield and adjusted if necessary. Major re-writes only occurred in cases of extreme urgency --and in fact occurred only once, when an unexpectedly short text, an anthology of stories, had to be extended at very short notice!
4: Grade-as-you-go
A publisher required vocabulary monitoring of a course on what might be termed a 'grade-as-you-go' basis The project was a twelve book series of texts for Primary schools to be presented to students with an ability range from complete beginner to secondary-school entrant. The basic lexis reference was a government list of English words that could be used in English texts for primary students, though no guidance was given as to how these words might be divided up for each of the six years of Primary schooling.
For the new series the language strategy followed was that (a) no vocabulary should be used that was not in the government list --or only in the most exceptional circumstances, e.g. where the use of a key topic word was unavoidable-- and (b) that the input rate of 'new' (i.e. hitherto unused) vocabulary should be kept within reasonable limits
5: Mainstream course development
In another current scheme, similar to #4, for a complete set of main and ancillary ELT primary course textbooks the publisher requires Luxfield just to do the vocabulary monitoring --all text adjustments are dealt with in-house.
6: Glossary development
A publisher who had to produce a six book business English course very quickly made use of CADET vocabulary monitoring to develop an accumulative six-level word list of the vocabulary of the whole course, and from that, a multi-lingual glossary of new-at-this-level items for each book.