1. What is the NGSL Profiler and how do I use it?

2. Introduction to the NGSL Project and its Key Wordlists

3. How do I cite output from the NGSL Profiler?

4. Who built the NGSL Profiler?

5. Introduction to the NGSL-GR List

6. What is the “SUP” in level one of many of the wordlists?

7. Introduction to Text Generator (beta)

8. Introduction to Text Rewriter (beta)

1. What is the NGSL Profiler and how do I use it?

The NGSL Profiler is an online text analysis tool which uses wordlists for ESL/EFL learners from the NGSL Project to analyze the difficulty of a text and to simplify it to the level of your students or intended audience. 

This type of tool is often used by publishers to create graded reading texts for extensive reading programs and by researchers to establish the difficulty of texts, but we have tried to create a teacher-friendly version here to help teachers to create, simplify or just simply gauge the appropriateness of a text for use in the classroom.

Normally, the goal is that students would know between 95-98% of the words in the text (95% is the level where most learners will be able to read a text and guess the meaning of unknown words from context and 98% is the level where they can read for pleasure), but at the very least the text should provide a minimum of 90% coverage.

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!

2. Introduction to NGSL Project and Key Wordlists

The NGSL Project is a large and growing collection of corpus-based word lists and online learning tools designed to meet the needs of second language learners of English. Each word list is extremely short, giving the highest coverage in the world for that particular genre. There are 600,000 words in the English language, but each of our lists offers 90% or more coverage with using only between 600~5000 words in that genre as follows:

The wordlists are gaining worldwide acceptance among educators, students, researchers, publishers, online learning companies and content providers and the NGSL Profiling tool provided for free in order to help all of these groups make better use of our lists. In fact, all of our wordlists and learning tools are open-source and free. You can download the lists, access the learning tools, and learn more about our project from the NGSL Project website www.newgeneralservicelist.com .  

3. How do I cite output from NGSL Profiler?

Use the following method to cite/reference NGSL Profiler according to the APA style guide:

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

4. Who built the NGSL Profiler?

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. It was developed as a joint project with Poodll which provides solutions for language teachers. Learn more about Poodll at https://poodll.com

The NGSL Profiler is based on a previous 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. 

5. Introduction to the NGSL-GR  List

Among other things, we designed the NGSL Profiler to help people who like to do Extensive Reading (ER) and Extensive Listening (EL) with their students. The NGSL Profiler  can easily grade reading and listening texts to a specific level, making it the perfect tool for creating original ER and EL materials as well as simplifying existing materials to the level of your students.

Although our core New General Service List (NGSL) of General English is a great starting point for this, the NGSL is only 2809 words long (which provides coverage of approximately 92% of most general English texts), whereas the thousands of  graded readers offered from 50+ publishers ranges from 50-4500 words. We therefore decided to provide an extended version of the NGSL known as the NGSL-GR which provides 11 levels going all the way up to 5000 words, specifically for the purpose of helping teachers, publishers and content developers to grade reading and listening materials for second language learners of English.

Most other profiling tools use 1000 word bands, but publishers of graded readers usually use much smaller bands. The NGSL-GR tries to meet this need by using eight bands of 400 words each up to 3200 word level and then three additional slightly larger bands of 600 words up to the 5000 word level.

Please note that we have not removed high frequency words simply because they are vulgar (there are only three) as this is not a list for teaching purposes but rather is an attempt to transition to authentic reading and listening materials based on the likelihood of meeting a word in authentic materials.

 6. What is the “SUP” in level one of many of the wordlists?

You might have noticed that for the NGSL wordlist (as well as all of our SP wordlists that include the NGSL as step 1), level 1 reads something like “Level 1 (words 1-400 + SUP). “SUP” means “supplemental”, and refers to the 50 extra words which are an official part of the NGSL but not ranked by frequency. SUP consists of three word sets that are considered very elementary to second language learners of English: Days of the week, months of the year, and number words. The reason for including these words as “SUP” is that not all days of the week, months of the year or number words appeared in the first 3000 most frequent words in the NGSL corpus even though most students learn the complete set of words at a very early stage. 

7. Introduction to Text Generator 

Text Generator is a simple AI-powered tool which helps you to generate short non-fiction texts suitable for second language learners of English. Simply enter a topic, hit the “generate article” button and then check the result for correctness (since AI sometimes makes up facts) and level. If the level appears to be too high for your students, you can use our Text Rewriter (beta) tool by hitting the “Send to Article Leveler” button at the bottom. If you have a specific NGSL level in mind you can also copy and paste the article into the Text Profiler  tool.

8. Introduction to Text Rewriter

While the TextProfiler  is a human-powered tool which helps you to simplify texts in terms of vocabulary difficulty, the Text Rewriter (beta) tool is an AI-powered tool which helps you to simplify texts in terms of sentence length and number of words. Just copy and paste the text you want to simplify into the big box, choose a level you want to simplify to (1 is the easiest and 5 is closest to original) and then hit the “Rewrite Article” button.