Get Challenging Words

Overview

Use this call to get a list of vocab words from your text that are more challenging than the text. A word is considered more challenging when is has a higher Lexile measure than the measure for the text. You can use options to customize the list of returned words.

Parameters

Parameter Type Description
text

String

The text you want to extract vocabulary words from.

options

Struct

The options argument is optional. If provided it can contain the following:
  • target_range: (Array) The Lexile range (inclusive) from which vocabulary words will be targeted. If not provided, the target_range will be determined by the Lexile measure of the text.
  • stop_list: (Array) A list of strings that will be used as a stop list when creating vocabulary words. Words included in the stop_list will not be considered for vocabulary words. If not provided, then a built-in list of vocabulary words will be used. If no filtering is desired then an empty list should be given.
  • stop_list_id: (Int) The ID of the user's saved stop list. The words included in the stop list will not be considered for the vocabulary words. This is like the stop_list option above, but instead of passing in a list of words the words are gotten from the list of saved words.
  • max_word_count: (Int) This changes the number of words that will be returned. The default is to return a list of 10 words. Enter 0 to return every possible word. Words on the stop list will not be returned, and only one word per word family will be returned.

Response

This returns a list of challenging vocabulary words from the text. By default, 10 words are returned unless you have set a different max_word_count.

Example

This is an example of how to make the call using Java.
import xmlrpclib
rpc = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('https://user:pass@vocabulary.lexile.com/API')
text = open('sample_text.txt').read()
vocab_words = rpc.vocab.get_challenging_vocab_words(text)