Free tool
Decodable text checker
Paste a page from a decodable book, a passage you wrote, or a few sentences. Pick the lesson your reader is on, and see which words they can sound out with what they have been taught so far.
Up to 3,000 characters at a time. Nothing you paste is saved.
How it decides
A word is decodable when a reader can sound it out with the letter-sound patterns they have already been taught. So the checker looks at each word one spelling at a time. Ship is the sounds /sh/, /ĭ/, /p/. If /sh/ spelled sh has not been taught yet, ship is not decodable yet, however short it is.
It also looks at word structure. A word with an ending like -ed or -ing, or with two syllables, waits until that structure has been taught too.
Some common words do not follow the patterns, or follow them only much later: said, was, the. These are taught as heart words, with the tricky part learned by heart. Once a heart word has been taught, the checker counts it as readable.
The lessons in the picker were created to align with UFLI Foundations' scope and sequence, from the first short a to multisyllable words. Choose the lesson your reader has just been taught; everything before it counts as taught.
Reading the result
- The share at the top is how many of the words are decodable or taught heart words. Many teachers look for 90% or more in a text a beginning reader practices with alone.
- Words that are not yet decodable have a wavy underline, and the list beside the text says what each one needs, such as a vowel team or an ending.
- Names and rare words that are not in our word list have a dashed underline. Check those by hand.
Pair it with the lesson sequence or the free printables.
Literacy Trail is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute. It contains no UFLI lesson content, only lesson names and order.
Plan the whole lesson, not just the text
In the app, each student's plan has blending lines, a word chain, dictation and heart words for their lesson, and the checker starts from where they are.