graded readers and reading for pleasure

Earlier this month in the UK it was national reading week - when young people were encouraged to read, read, read!

For language students, English easy readers and audio books are a great way into enjoying reading. It's certainly about "readability" in the ESL/ESOL/TEFL classroom, as one of the key language learning benefits of graded readers is that you feel you can get into the text immediately and without having to reach for a dictionary for every other word. In other words, you can focus on the story.

A new book looks at exactly this: Why every English learner needs a good story.. And Fabio Cerpelloni of the E L Gazette speaks with Andrew Dilger, managing editor at Oxford University Press (OUP), about "creating effective graded readers, adapting to Gen Z’s reading habits, and bringing extensive reading into the classroom".

Graded readers are tools to help learners engage with extensive reading, which is the type of reading we do for pleasure. Extensive reading has to be easy, low-stakes, and fun. It shouldn’t block students. So, a good graded reader is one where the language has been carefully selected and graded to offer the learner a smooth reading experience.

But there’s no point producing a supremely graded text that is lifeless or uninteresting! So a good graded reader should also present a really attractive topic — one that learners would want to read about in their own language.

An effective graded reader has good illustrations or photos, too – not just for an aesthetic point of view but for functional reasons as well. Illustrations are often a visual gloss in this type of material. They are teaching aids that help the learner understand the language.

In short, an effective graded reader is approachable, interesting, and well-designed.

Try going to YouTube for some English graded readers level 1 - where you have both the text and the audio, pictures and good pronunciation - and hopefully they will be 'approachable, interesting and well-designed'!

.

.

.