How difficult are your texts for language learners? Are they A1, A2, B1 or higher? The Language Level Evaluator English (LLE English) checks the language level of a text using a range of measurable criteria. Wenn Sie deutsche Texte analysieren möchten, gehen Sie zu unserer Seite LLE Deutsch.

If you’re involved in the field of EAL or ESL – as a language teacher, author, educational institute, publisher or other – you know that it’s not always easy to determine how difficult a text will be for different learners. LLE English simplifies the process of evaluating your written texts to CEFR levels A1–C2.

Sign up for the free version of LLE English Lite to try it out for yourself.

Sign up now for LLE English Lite

Please note: LLE English Lite only separates the words of a short text into the different CEFR levels (lexical analysis). You can upgrade at any time to LLE English Pro for more powerful features. Learn more about the differences and pricing below.

Terms & Conditions

Before using LLE English you will be asked to accept our Terms & Conditions. Your consent will be required in order to finish the registration process.

LLE English Lite

Example of LLE English Analysis
Example of a lexical analysis with LLE English Lite: the words are sorted by CEFR difficulty (A1-C1/C2). Click on a colored bar to see the words grouped by level, here “C1/C2”. Then click on a word to see all the sentences containing that word, here “chore”.

LLE English Pro

Text classification to CEFR level with LLE English
Example of an overall classification with LLE English Pro: based on machine learning which, besides lexis and semantics, takes a multitude of additional criteria into account. This is an analysis of our LLE English Terms & Conditions.
Sentence length analysis with LLE English
Example of a semantic evaluation with LLE English Pro: you see the number of sentences in a text, the number of words per sentence and the percentage breakdown of all sentences by length. Click on a bar to see the sentences in that group, here a sentence with 37 words.
LLE English Pro Export function
Example of the export function in LLE English Pro: choose which level of words are relevant and export them as an Excel file. In this example, only the C1/C2 words are exported, e.g. to create a worksheet for students. The text is from a StoryPlanet English short story by Johanna da Rocha Abreu.

Which version of LLE English is right for me?

LLE English is available in two versions. A free “Lite” version and the full “Pro” version for an annual fee. Here is an overview of the differences:

LLE English Lite | For texts up to 3,000 characters

Includes the following lexical analyses:

  • the total number of words
  • the absolute number of unique words (lemmas)
  • the learning level of each word (based on English Profile A1-C2) according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR)
  • the percentage distribution of all words according to learning level

LLE English Pro | For texts of any length*

Plus, in addition to the Lite version:

  • Semantics: determines the number of sentences, the number of words per sentence and the percentage distribution of all sentences based on length
  • Overall Classification: gives an estimated level for the text (A1-C1/C2) based on machine learning with a large corpus of pre-classified texts
  • Export: possibility to export the analysis as an Excel file, e.g. to create vocabulary lists for the text

* A text with a maximum of 2,000,000 characters can be entered in LLE English Pro, the equivalent of a book with several hundred pages. NB: the longer the text, the longer the analysis takes.

Try LLE English Lite for free

To use LLE English Lite, all you need to do is register and accept our Terms & Conditions.

Sign up now for LLE English Lite

How much does LLE English Pro cost?

An annual license for one person to LLE English Pro currently costs around €100 (depending on where you reside, taxes and transfer fees vary). The license is non-renewing, so you decide each year if you want to continue paying. Collective licenses are also offered, e.g. if an educational institute wants to get access for several teachers. The license fee covers the hosting costs of the LLE, but also helps us to continuously develop and improve the tool.

Would you like to purchase an annual license to LLE English Pro? Please use our request form to provide us with a few basic details, so we can create an individualized quote for you.

Request a quote for LLE English Pro

Who did we develop the LLE for?

The LLE is primarily a supportive tool for selecting suitable reading texts and/or optimizing them for foreign language learning. We have specifically developed this tool for:

  • Publishers who have language learners as a target audience and therefore require a competent assessment of the CEFR language level of their contents.
  • Teachers of foreign languages who want to check whether the text material they create or adapt is suitable for the language level of their students.
  • Writers who want to optimize their texts for specific language levels using detailed analysis results.
  • Test creators who want to quickly create vocabulary lists or verify that their contents are suited to a specific learning level.
  • Us! We use the LLE for our language learning app StoryPlanet, in which we offer language-level specific reading texts and other content for learners.

The LLE is also available in different versions for the following languages: German, French and Spanish. Would you like to learn more about these versions?

Learn more about LLE Deutsch.

Please use our contact form to ask about the LLE for French or Spanish.

Acknowledgements & Sources

The LLE was made possible by bringing together various specialists and expertise. The core team consists of programmers, linguists and pedagogues from the companies L-Pub GmbH and Ernst Klett Sprachen GmbH as well as from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

Below, we would like to introduce the people and the sources we worked with.

Core team LLE
The core team at L-Pub that worked on the development of the LLE.

The L-Pub Team 

  • David P. Steel (concept, production, sales)
  • Franck Valentin (architect, programming)
  • Battista Vailati (programming)
  • Leonore Kleinkauf (project management)
  • Vanessa Appoh (computational linguistics)
  • Miriam Hunter (corpus preparation)
  • Anette John (PR, marketing)

The Ernst Klett Sprachen Team

 The following employees of Ernst Klett Sprachen GmbH were involved in the development of the LLE:

  • Elizabeth Webster (strategy, vision)
  • Hendrik Funke (planning, project leader)
  • Sebastian Weber (didactics)
  • Wolfgang Volz (editorial)

The Technical University of Darmstadt Team

A collaboration with the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt was made possible thanks to a grant from the Hessen Agentur (LOEWE 3 program). The following people from the university were involved in the development of the LLE:

  • Dr. Iryna Gurevych (Leader of the UKP Lab)
  • Christian M. Meyer (project coordination)
  • Doctoral student Ji-Ung Lee (machine learning, deep learning, programming)

Vocabulary lists

The English-language lexical classification to CEFR is based on a mixture of:

Technological Components

DKPro Core (ASL/GPL) Eckart de Castilho, R. and Gurevych, I. (2014). A broad-coverage collection of portable NLP components for building shareable analysis pipelines. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Open Infrastructures and Analysis Frameworks for HLT (OIAF4HLT) at COLING 2014, p 1-11, Dublin, Ireland.

Apache uimaFIT / UIMA Ogren, Philip and Bethard, Steven, Building Test Suites for UIMA Components; Proceedings of the Workshop on Software Engineering, Testing, and Quality Assurance for Natural Language Processing (SETQA-NLP 2009), June, 2009, Boulder, Colorado, Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1-4 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W09-1501 https://uima.apache.org/uimafit.html https://uima.apache.org/index.html

Mate Tools Bernd Bohnet and Anders Björkelund; Tools for Natural Language Analysis, Generation and Machine Learning https://code.google.com/p/mate-tools/

The Stanford Parser http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml

State funding

We would like to express our sincere thanks to the Hessen Agentur and the LOEWE 3 program, which made the collaboration with the Technical University of Darmstadt possible from 2017 to 2019.

The initial stages of the LLE project were also supported by local ERDF funding from the City of Offenbach am Main from 2013 to 2015.